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THE 



MISSION OF THE CHURCH 



FOUR LECTURES 

DELIVERED IN JUNE, 1892, IN THE CATHEDRAL 
CHURCH OF ST. ASAPH 



BY s 



CHARLES GORE, M.A. 

Principal of Pusey House; Fellow of Trinity 
College, Oxford 






NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



1592 

[All rights reserved] 



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Thus. Jjurary 
of Cokgi 



WASHUWTOtt 






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4 



COPYRIGHT, 1892, BY 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 



PKEFACE 



This volume contains the substance of the lec- 
tures delivered by me in the Cathedral Church of 
St. Asaph, about the festival of St. Peter in this 
year, on the subject suggested to me, viz. the Mis- 
sion of the Church. The lectures were not written, 
and I had, when they were delivered, no intention 
of publishing them ; but I was led to alter my 
determination and have here endeavoured to repro- 
duce them in substance, with slight alterations 
and additions, by the help of a report published in 
the Church Times. The " excitement," alluded to 
in the opening of the first lecture, was that occa- 
sioned by the General Election then immediately 
approaching, which, in Wales at least, had direct 
reference to the position of the Church. The 
general argument of the lectures will indicate 
what is to my mind the best method of Church 
defence. 

Before going further I should wish to express 

my sense of the great good which gatherings of 

iii 



IV PREFACE 

the Clergjr, such as that in which it was my 
privilege to take part at St. Asaph, are calcu- 
lated to do. It would be indeed a good thing if 
in every diocese, especially every country diocese, 
a benefaction similar to that which pays a lecturer 
at St. Asaph, only too liberally, were to open the 
way to a similar gathering. To get a great pro- 
portion of the clergy of a diocese together during 
four days for common prayer and eucharist, and 
a course of instruction such as leads naturally to 
mutual enquiry, discussion and intercourse, seems 
to me a measure admirably calculated to meet the 
evils which isolation and the prevalence of spirit- 
ual apathy tend to generate in rural dioceses. 
Why should not the example be widely followed ? 
I know that these lectures will be condemned 
by many as too ecclesiastical. "By making so 
much of the Church organization," it will be said, 
"you only alienate the Nonconformists, and pro- 
mote disunion." My answer to this would he a 
plain one. If we believe — what the primitive 
Church and the New Testament documents do, as 
it seems to me, come near to forcing us to believe 
— that our Lord founded a visible Church, and 
that this Church with her creed and scriptures, 
ministry and sacraments, is the instrument which 
He has given us to use, our course is clear. We 



PREFACE V 

must devote our energies to making the Church 
adequate to the divine intention — as strong in 
principle, as broad in compass, as loving in spirit, 
as our Lord intended her to be ; trusting that, in 
proportion as her true motherhood is realized, her 
children will find their peace within her bosom. 
We cannot believe that there is any religious 
need which at the last resort the resources of 
the Church are inadequate to meet. 

Meanwhile it is of great importance that we 
should remember that all baptized persons, even 
if they belong to separatist organizations, are as 
individuals members of the body of Christ. Surely 
it would be well if we Churchmen endeavoured to 
take every opportunity of cultivating equal and 
friendly social relations with Nonconformists. I 
believe Dr. Dollinger once expressed a great hope 
that internal reunion among Christians in England 
would be largely promoted by the common educa- 
tion of Churchmen and Nonconformists at the 
universities. This common education, promoting 
friendliness among those who are to be clergy of 
the Church or ministers of different religious 
bodies, may do much good. But may not such 
friendly relations be established equally well else- 
where? Such personal acquaintance is much 
more likely to do good than the attendance of 



VI PEEFACE 

Churchmen at Nonconformist gatherings to depre- 
ciate their own Churchmanship. This latter 
course of action does not appear to minister to 
any other result than that of promoting disunion 
among ourselves. 

Once more, these lectures will be said to minister 
to sacerdotalism. There is no doubt a widespread 
horror of " sacerdotalism," but the way to meet it 
is not, I think, by vague denunciation or vague 
glorification of an undefined principle ; but by 
careful explanation of what the Catholic principle 
of the apostolic succession in the ministry means, 
as expounded by the best theologians and verified 
in the documents of the New Testament. Arch- 
deacon Farrar, in a recent denunciation of " sacer- 
dotalism" in the Contemporary Review for July 
of this year, has quoted some expressions of mine 
in repudiation of the idea of a vicarious priesthood 
with apparent approval. "It is encouraging to 
find that the head of the Pusey House recognizes 
the priesthood of the English Church as ministe- 
rial . . . and says : ' It is an abuse of the sacerdotal 
conception, if it be supposed that the priesthood 
exists to celebrate sacrifices or acts of worship in 
the place of the body of the people or as their 
substitutes/ ' May I assure the archdeacon that 
I am not separating myself from other High 



PREFACE vil 

Churchmen or from Catholic theologians as a 
whole, in maintaining the ministerial and repre- 
sentative character of the Christian priesthood ? 

Xo doubt, however, as all the best things are 
most liable to corruption, so there is a reality 
corresponding to what is denounced as ecclesias- 
tical exclusiveness and sacerdotal pride. It is in 
view of this that the Rev. E. F. Russell, of St. 
Alban's, Holborn, after speaking of the late well- 
known vicar of that Church as one of those who 
i; to some extent at least, have realized in their 
own person those revived ideals of the priesthood, 
its supernatural character, mission, and endowment, 
which are filling the hearts and firing the zeal of 
so many of the new generation of our clergy" — 
adds the words, " Ideals of any sort are dangerous 
visitants to vain and shallow minds. In the thin 
soil of a poor nature they bear ugly fruit in arro- 
gance, or insolent pretentiousness. It is not to be 
denied that instances of this 'bringing forth of 
wild grapes ' are not unknown amongst us. But it 
is far otherwise in the case of those loftier, nobler 
souls, which, thank God, are also to be found in 
our ranks. Upon them the dignity of the sacer- 
dotal character, the glory of a divine trust for the 
good of human life, weighs with the oppression of 
an almost unbearable responsibility. They find in 



Vlll PREFACE 

it a ground, not for self-exaltation or self-assertion, 
but rather for the deepest self-humiliation. They 
are filled with concern how they may make good 
its requirements. A sense of shortcoming haunts 
them. The vision of what should be prevents all 
satisfaction in that which is. Hence the feature 
common to the saintliest among the clergy, every- 
where and in all times, of a merciless self-efface- 
ment and self-sacrifice, and, by natural consequence, 
an especial devotion to the cross of Christ. " 1 

In fact, in proportion as we believe in our 
priesthood, Ave believe that we must live and die 
for men; nay more, that we must represent men, 
represent what is good even in the least enlightened 
aspirations of people about us. This ideal is not 
one which, honestly pursued, will minister to any- 
thing else than humility and sympathy. For to 
understand men we must learn to honour them, 
and this is only possible to humility and self-efface- 
ment. 

I have enunciated principles in this book which 
I have endeavoured to justify at length elsewhere. 
Thus the ecclesiastical principle, and the principle 
of the apostolic succession asserted in Lecture I, I 
have vindicated at length in The Church and the 
Ministry (Longmans) : the Anglican position as 

1 Alexander Heriot M achonochie (Kegan Paul, 1890), p. ix. 



PREFACE IX 

against Rome, also asserted in Lecture I, in. the 
Roman Catholic Clai?ns (Longmans, see 3rd or 
4th edit.) : the orthodox position as against de- 
structive criticism, asserted in Lecture III, in the 
Bampton Lectures of 1891 (John Murray) : the 
position of freedom within the Church in regard 
to many points raised by the criticism of the .Old 
Testament, also asserted in Lecture III, in the 
Essay on " The Holy Spirit and Inspiration," in 
Lux Mundi and in the Preface to the 10th edition 
(John Murray). I must express a hope that if 
anyone wishes to criticize opinions which I have 
expressed on these subjects in the following pages, 
he will remember that they are justified at greater 

length elsewhere. 

C. G. 

Michaelmas, 1892. 



CONTENTS 



LECTURE I 

PAGE 

The Mission of the Church 1 



LECTURE II 
Unity within the Church of England ... 29 

LECTURE HI 

The Relation of the Church to Independent and 

Hostile Opinion 58 

LECTURE IV 
The Mission of the Church in Society . . 85 

APPENDED NOTES 

1. The witness to the doctrine of a visible Church 

ix Clement and Ignatius Ill 

2. The recent charge of Archdeacon Sinclair . . Ill 

3. The necessity of sacraments not absolute . . 114 

4. Irenaeus on the elements of the Christian Religion 115 

xi 



Xll CONTENTS 

PAGE 

5. The contents of the New Testament tradition . 115 

6. The Anglican doctrine of the sacraments . . 116 

7. The Anglican requirement of the apostolic suc- 

cession 116 

8. The meaning of the word " spiritual" . . . 117 

9. Gnostic esotericism and Christian universality . 117 

10. Tertullian on the simplicity of Christian sacra- 

ments . . 118 

11. Goethe on the sacramental system . . . 118 

12. That Christians have no need to ask for the 

Spirit 119 

13. Infants who are proper subjects of baptism . 119 

14. Science cannot proceed without assumptions . 121 

15. Evolution and its relation to Religious Thought 121 

16. The resolutions of the Pan-Anglican Conference 

on Divorce 122 

17. Christ our example and our inward life . . 123 



THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 



LECTUEE I 

THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

"As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you." 

— St. John xx. 21. 

Reverend Father in God, my brethren of the 
clergy and of the laity, — If it be true, as a general 
rule, that the fault to which the Church in agri- 
cultural districts is specially liable is the fault of 
apathy and indolence, yet it is, I suppose, pro- 
foundly improbable that such would be at all the 
danger of the Church of Christ in Wales under 
present circumstances. Whatever else may be the 
effect of the agitation of past years and of the 
present moment round the walls of your spiritual 
building, it must at least have the effect of putting 
you upon your mettle. It must substitute for any 
tendency to indolence or apathy a condition of 
excitement, with what is good and what is bad in 
excitement. Thus we hear round about us to-day 
the note of encouragement ; and Ave hear the note 
of fear, the presage of disaster : — the note of 
encouragement, because of the real progress of the 
Church in recent years, the note of fear, because 

l 



2 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

so much is still lacking, the ground still to be 
made up is so vast, the dangers which threaten us 
are so alarming. We may have been reminded of 
our own mingled atmosphere of grief and joy by 
the lesson from Ezra which we read but a few days 
ago describing the state of things in Jerusalem 
when the builders after the captivity had "laid 
again the foundation of the temple of the Lord " * : 
— " All the people shouted with a great shout when 
they praised the Lord, because the foundation of 
the house of the Lord was laid. But many of the 
priests and Levites and chief of the fathers, who 
were ancient men, that had seen the first house, 
when the foundation of this house was laid before 
their eyes, wept with a loud voice ; and many 
shouted aloud for joy : so that the people could 
not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the 
noise of the weeping of the people." 

Now, in times of excitement, if we would be 
spiritually-minded, we have one supreme and para- 
mount obligation — it is that of recalling ourselves 
again and again, away from the cry of the religious 
or political platform, to first principles, those first 
principles in the light of which our true life must 
be lived. What do we mean by being Church- 
men? What is the Divine mission of the Church? 
What is the ground of our imperishable confi- 
dence ? It is — " As my Father hath sent me, 
even so send I you." 

i Ezra iii. 11-13. 



THE MISSION OF THE CHUKCH 



This is, ill its ultimate terms, the mission of 
the Church. It is the carrying out, in its full 
scope, of the mission of the Christ : " As my 
Father hath sent me." God has given us a revela- 
tion of Himself in His incarnate Son ; and this 
revelation or disclosure of God in Christ is ex- 
pressed in the threefold office of Christ as prophet, 
priest, and king. 

As prophet He not merely conveys to man a 
particular message about God, but He discloses 
God under conditions of our humanity. He is 
very God, Son of God; and, being God, He dis- 
closes in the intelligible terms of our humanity 
what God is. We look to the human mind and 
will and character, the human justice and love, of 
Jesus of Nazareth, and we know that we behold 
nothing else than the mind and will and character, 
the justice and love, of very God. Moreover what 
is revealed is not merely the mind or purpose 
of God towards men ; but, within certain limits, 
there is a real disclosure of His inner being, of 
those inner relations which bind altogether in the 
indissoluble unity of Godhead, the Father, the Son, 
and the Hohy Ghost. Christ is prophet, then, and 
discloses God to man ; but He is also priest, to 
unite or reconcile man to God. In this capacity 
He first exhibits, in supreme perfection and ful- 
ness, that unity with God of which our nature is 



4 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

capable. In His own person He represents the 
perfect attitude of man to God. In His own per- 
son He offers, in our name and on our behalf, the 
sacrifice of perfect homage to the divine righteous- 
ness, which our sins had been continuously out- 
raging. All this He does first in His own person 
independently of us and in our stead; but what 
He first does for us, He proceeds to do in us. He 
takes us up into union with Himself. We share 
His manhood, His communion with God, His self- 
oblation to the Father. Thus He is our priest. 
Thirdly, He is king; because He comes forth to 
make His moral claim felt upon our manhood : to 
redeem and to liberate it, to subdue and to govern 
it, in all its parts and faculties. Thus He is 
prophet, priest, and king ; and, as His Father 
hath sent Him on this prophetic, priestly, kingly 
mission, so in His turn in the persons of His apos- 
tles He sends out His Church. "As my Father 
hath sent me, even so send I you." 

The Church perpetuates the mission of her Mas- 
ter — prophetic, priestly, kingly. 

She perpetuates the prophetic mission of Christ, 
because she carries down through the ages, as its 
pillar and ground, the truth which once for all was 
disclosed in Jesus, the truth involved in His per- 
son, God and man; the truth about God, which 
He disclosed in His life, His works, His words ; 
the truth about man, his destiny, his capacity, and 
the sin which has marred his destiny, and sepa- 
rated him from God; and the truth about redemp- 



THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 5 

tion, the redemption wrought out by God in Christ. 
This truth involved in the person of our redeemer, 
Jesus, it is the prophetic office of the Church per- 
petually to bear witness to, to place continuously 
before the eyes of men, to inculcate again and 
again in its varied adaptation to the different 
needs of different ages. Again, the Church goes 
forth to perpetuate the priestly mission of Christ. 
For the work of Christ is not perpetuated merely 
in words ; there is more to be done than teaching. 
"The kingdom of God is not in word but in 
power." There is the gift of grace, the gift of 
the Spirit, and manifold gifts from the Spirit in 
view of man's manifold needs; and the Church is 
the home in which this rich treasure is dispensed, 
the household of God in which is distributed the 
bread of life, a portion to each in due season. It 
is by the ministration of these manifold gifts of 
grace that our humanity is raised again into its 
true relation to God, and brought back into union 
with Him. And the Church shares also Christ's 
kingly function. The pastoral office is at least 
as much an office of ruling as of feeding. The 
Church is to discipline, to guide, to strengthen, 
the manifold characters, wills and minds of men, 
till this human life of ours is brought, in all its 
parts and capacities, into the obedience of Christ. 
Thus the Church perpetuates the threefold mis- 
sion of the Christ. " As my Father hath sent me 
prophetic, priestly, kingly, so send I you, pro- 
phetic, priestly, kingly." 



THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 



II 

Now the point which, at this stage, I wish to 
emphasize is that Christ has thus enshrined in a 
visible body, a visible Church, those gifts of truth 
and grace with which He has enriched mankind. 

Another method might have been adopted. It 
is conceivable that our Lord might have pro- 
claimed a certain body of truth, and then left it 
to make its own way, to advance by its own weight 
among mankind. He might have scattered truth 
at random, like "bread upon the waters," over the 
area of human need. But in fact He did some- 
thing different, He enshrined the truth deliberately 
in an organized society; and it is, we believe, in 
accordance with the mind of Christ that the Church 
has in fact gone out into the world as a society 
based upon a distinctive creed, a creed gradually 
enshrined in formulas and appealing to a fixed 
canon of sacred scriptures, representing the origi- 
nal teaching of Christ's Apostles. 

Once more, the gifts of grace are made part of a 
visible system through the ministry of sacraments. 
What are sacraments ? They are outward, visible 
and also social, ceremonies intended for the con- 
veyance of spiritual gifts. There is the gift of 
regeneration, the gift of the indwelling of the 
Holy Ghost, the gift of the bread of life, the flesh 
and blood of Christ. Now these are spiritual 
gifts, and we can conceive of their having been 



THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 7 

given through purely invisible channels ; in fact, 
they are given by channels which, as I say, are 
not only visible, but also social. Baptism, through 
which is conveyed the Spirit's gift of regeneration 
or incorporation into Christ, is an outward cere- 
mony, and an outward ceremony which, at the 
same time, is social. It is a ceremony of admis- 
sion into a visible society. Confirmation, by 
which is bestowed the indwelling of the Holy 
Ghost, is an act of benediction, the laying on of 
the hands of the chief ruler of a society upon one 
of its members. The Eucharist again, in which 
is given and taken the body and blood of Christ, 
is an outward ceremony, and a ceremony which, 
in its material basis, involves a fraternal meal. 
Each of the sacraments is not only a visible but 
also a social institution; such as involves that 
men are to be admitted into, and kept in relation 
to, a visible societj^. 

Once again this society is not only to be a 
visible reality at any particular moment. It is 
also to be continuous down the ages. It is in 
view of this need that the meaning of the apostolic 
succession of the ministry becomes apparent. For 
the Church is a catholic society, that is, a society 
belonging to all nations and ages. As a catholic 
society it lacks the bonds of the life of a city 
or a nation — local contiguity, common language, 
common customs. We cannot, then, very well 
conceive how its corporate continuity could have 
been maintained otherwise than through some sue- 



8 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

cession of persons such as, bearing the apostolic 
commission for ministry, should be in each gener- 
ation the necessary centres of the Church's life. 
Granted this apostolic succession, there is guar- 
anteed in the Church as a whole, and in each local 
church, a perpetual stewardship of the grace and 
truth which came by Jesus Christ, a perpetual 
stewardship which, at the same time, acts as the 
link of continuity, binding the churches of all 
ages and of all nations into visible unity with the 
apostolic college. 

Thus by her creeds and her canon of scriptures, 
by her sacraments and her apostolic succession, 
the Church is rendered necessarily a visible body. 
It is spiritual in its aim. It exists for no other 
purpose than to minister to the spiritual union of 
man with God. It is spiritual in its aim and 
essence, but it is visible in fact on earth. The 
invisible gift is conveyed through visible channels: 
the invisible essence is enshrined in a visible 
body. 

Of this doctrine of the visible Church we may 
say that it is first natural and second historical. 
Its intimate correspondence with the principle of 
the Incarnation we shall have the opportunity of 
noticing in the next lecture. 

First it is natural: it corresponds to a law of 
our nature. Aristotle said long ago that man is a 
"social animal." The meaning of this is that 
though society is made up of individuals, and 
indeed the aim of society is the development of 



THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 9 

the faculties of the individual, yet man realizes 
his individuality only by relations to a society. 
It is the society that makes him man, it is the 
social life of the nation or the city that enables 
the individual to become truly human. 

The moral philosophy of the last, and of the 
early part of the present century was characterized 
by individualistic theories, according to which 
men were regarded as primarily individuals and 
only secondarily as members of society. But it 
is noticeable that modern ethical writers, even of 
a non-theistic school, such as Mr. Leslie Stephen 
and Mr. Alexander, exhibit a return to the Aris- 
totelian principle. "We must take society and 
the individual as we find them in fact," says Mr. 
Alexander, "the latter with ties that bind him to 
others, the former as something which we have 
never known to be formed by the mere coalescence 
of separate and independent individuals." 1 It is, 
then, in correspondence with a fundamental law 
of man's social nature that the religion of the Son 
of Man should not deal with us first as isolated 
individuals; that it should present itself as a 
society incorporating individuals and developing 
the individual life by first absorbing it. It is 
because man is social that "the perfect man " 2 is 
to be realized, not by the single Christian, but by 
the whole Church. 

Secondly, this theory of the Church is historical 

1 Alexander, Moral Order and Progress (Trtibner, 1889), 
p. 96. *Eph. iv. 13 [R.V.]. 



10 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

— the title-deeds of Christianity establish it. His- 
torical proof is a long matter. It cannot be given 
fully in a single lecture, but I may refer to one or 
two chief elements in it. 

1. The method of Christ. We can conceive, as 
I have said, easily enough how our Lord might 
have cast the truth which He came to teach man- 
kind broadcast over society, and left it to make 
its own way. But the more you examine the 
gospels, the more you will note that His method 
was not in fact this, but the opposite. More and 
more He concentrates all His efforts upon that 
little band beside Him, whom by steady discipline 
He was preparing to be the nucleus of His new 
and distinctive society. On this vigil of St. 
Peter's Day, we naturally notice this more par- 
ticularly: He turned away from our human nature 
as He found it, unsatisfactory and inadequate, 
when He wished to lay His new foundation. " He 
did not commit himself to men . . . for he knew 
what was in man." Those faults in our human 
nature, which in every generation have turned 
philanthropists into cynics, and driven the wisest 
wellnigh mad — that unsatisfactoriness of our 
fallen manhood — Jesus knew from the first. 
Therefore He waited, He laboured, He prayed in 
our true manhood till He had prepared the soil 
which should be adequate for the seed He meant 
to sow in it ; till He had found a foundation, not 
like the shifting sand of ordinary fallen manhood, 
but strong and rock-like, on which He could build; 



THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 11 

and this rock-like character our human nature was 
to gain only through faith in Himself complete 
and entire. Thus, when He had gained from the 
lips of St. Peter an adequate confession of His 
name, a confession different altogether from the 
vague and shifting ideas about Himself which 
were current among the people generally, then it 
was that He could make a beginning with his 
new spiritual structure. He turned to Peter, the 
representative of the new r confession, and said, 
"Blessed art thou, Simon Bar- Jonah; for flesh 
and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my 
Father which is in heaven. And I also say unto 
thee, that thou art Peter — Rockman — and upon 
this rock I will build my church, and the gates of 
death shall not prevail against it." 1 We know 
the subsequent history. The faith of Peter was 
shared by the apostolic college, and the promise to 
Peter w r as, as the Christian fathers perceived, ful- 
filled to the whole apostolic company in their com- 
mon commission: "As my Father hath sent me, 
even so send I you." And the meaning of this 
whole history is, that Jesus did, with all deliber- 
ation, establish a distinct society to represent the 
kingdom of God on earth, a society distinct from 
humanity at large, based upon the explicit con- 
fession of His name. Consider further the method 
of Christ, the institution of social sacraments, 
baptism and the eucharist, and you will find that 

1 St. Matt. xvi. 17, 18. Cf. Holland's Creed and Character, 
Serm. III. "The Rock of the Church" (Longmans). 



12 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

it becomes to your mind a more and more luminous 
truth, that our Lord was constituting, to last till 
He should "come again," one visible fraternity, 
the company of His " elect" in which to enshrine 
the spiritual life which was to have its source in 
Himself. 

2. Now let us read, from this point of view, the 
apostolic writing; and we shall notice with what 
clearness the religion of Jesus Christ appears in 
history as a visible society, and nothing else than 
a visible society. Its story is told simply enough 
in the Acts of the Apostles. In that book being 
a Christian means nothing else than membership 
in the visible body, the Church. The Church 
advances from place to place, but the local bodies, 
"the churches," are the expansions of "the 
Church" 1 — based upon the "apostles' doctrine," 
continuing in the "apostles' fellowship," and 
governed by the common apostolic authority. 2 
The same truth is apparent in St. Paul's epistles 
— not only in the Epistle to the Ephesians, or in 
the Pastoral Epistles in which he is specially 
making provision for the Church's future in view 
of his own death, but also in an epistle of an ear- 
lier period. Observe in the First Epistle to Cor- 
inth, where St. Paul is dealing with the lament- 
able case of incest in the young church there, how 
instinctively clear to his mind is the distinction 
between "those within" and "those without." 3 

1 Acts ix. 31 ; xi. 20 ; xiii. 1 ; xv. 41 ; xvi. 5. 

2 Acts xv. 28. 3 1 Cor. v. 9-13. 



THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 13 

Christianity is not a set of opinions which people 
may hold, as in fact people in India to-day do 
hold, more or less, the truth about Christ over a 
wide area of Hindoo society. To be a Christian 
means to be within that apostolic society, which 
was made up of good and evil mingled together, 
as this incestuous man, and those aiding and 
abetting him, were as tares among the wheat, in 
the young community at Corinth. 

3. Let us pass to the sub-apostolic Church. 
We should all of us make ourselves familiar with 
those very short writings, the Epistle of Clement 
and the Epistles of Ignatius. The Epistle of 
Clement was written about the same time as St. 
John's Gospel, in the West, at Rome. It comes, 
then, from under the immediate shadow of apos- 
tolic influence and teaching; yet notice how 
unquestionably this doctrine of the visible Church 
is its characteristic mark. There is no conception 
of Christianity there discoverable, except this con- 
ception of an actual society, with its divinely 
established order and its officers commissioned by 
apostolic authority. 1 

You turn from the West, from Clement, from 
the influence of St. Peter and St. Paul, to Igna- 
tius, in the East, to the sphere of the influence of 
St. John, and still you find the same thing. Read 
the letters of Ignatius the martyr, written about 
a.d. 110, on his way to death. He is hard pressed 
to deliver his message to the churches before he is 
1 See appended note 1. 



14 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

taken away. And the central interest of his mes- 
sage is twofold. It lies first in the paramount 
necessity which he discovers in the truth of the 
Incarnation, that Christ, the very Son of God, did 
really take our human nature ; and secondly in his 
insistence upon the truth that God's message to 
man is enshrined in those visible societies which 
have for their ministers bishops, priests, and dea- 
cons, " without which three orders no Church has 
a title to the name." 1 

4. As w r e move down the record of history we 
find the Church in different parts of the world 
assuming different characteristics. In the West, 
where the Roman genius prevails, the special 
characteristic is that of order and discipline. In 
Alexandria Christianity is regarded primarily as 
the truth, which is to attract, to satisfy, to edu- 
cate, the intellect and life of man. But this 
variety in the local characteristics of churches 
only throws into higher relief the common under- 
lying creed and conception of the visible Church. 
In regard to the Church, its sacraments, its min- 
istry, there is no hesitation. The idea of a num- 
ber of individuals combining to form a church of 
their own with an organization developed out of 
themselves is one which, if heard of at all, as 
among the Montanists, is heard of only to be 
repudiated. Of the common doctrine of the 
Church I will quote only one specimen, and it 
shall be from Tertullian — a passage in which he 
1 Ign. ad Trail. 3, Lightfoot's trans. 



THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 15 

declares that, whatever doctrine may be matter of 
dispute, this at least cannot be. "Christ Jesus, 
our Lord," he says, 1 "so long as He was living 
on earth, spoke Himself either openly to the peo- 
ple, or apart to His disciples. From amongst 
these He had attached to His person twelve 
especially, who were destined to be the teachers 
of the nations. Accordingly, when one of these 
had fallen away, the remaining eleven received 
His command, as He was departing to the Father, 
after His resurrection, to go and teach the nations, 
who were to be baptized into the Father, and the 
Son, and the Holy Spirit. At once, then, the 
Apostles, whose mission this title indicates, after 
adding Matthias to their number, as the twelfth, 
in the place of Judas, on the authority of the 
prophecy in David's Psalm, and after receiving 
the promised strength of the Holy Ghost to enable 
them to work miracles and preach, first of all bore 
witness to the faith in Judaea and established 
churches, and afterwards, going out into the 
world, proclaimed the same teaching of the same 
faith to the nations, and forthwith founded 
churches in every city, from which all other 
churches in their turn have received the tradition 
of the faith and the seeds of doctrine ; yes, and are 
daily receiving, that they may become churches; 
and it is on this account that they too will be 
reckoned apostolic, as being the offspring of apos- 
tolic churches. Every kind of thing must be 
1 Tertull. depraescr. 20. 



16 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

referred to its origin. Accordingly, many and 
great as are the churches, yet all is that one first 
Church which is from the Apostles, that one 
whence all are derived. So all are the first, and 
all are apostolic, while all together prove their 
unity; while the fellowship of peace, and the title 
of brotherhood, and the interchange of hospitality 
remain amongst them — rites which are based on 
no other principle than the one handing down of 
the same faith." 



Ill 

"I believe in one Holy Catholic Church." 
This act of faith puts us in opposition to current 
"undenominationalism," and, as we hold it in the 
Anglican Church, to the exclusive claim of the 
Roman communion. Both oppositions must be 
briefly considered. 

Undenominationalism. By this name I refer to 
the theory which represents men as first becoming 
Christians by an act of individual faith, and, 
after that, combining into Christian societies, 
greater or smaller, as suits their predilections. 1 
This, you observe, is the opposite of the theory 
that men become Christians, in the first instance, 
by incorporation into the one Christian society, 
and then, after that, are bound to realize individ- 
ually their Christian privileges. This second 
theory, if what I have been saying is true, is the 
1 See app. note 2. 



THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 17 

one which alone is sanctioned in the original 
documents of Christianity. Whether it seems 
therefore at any particular moment advantageous 
or disadvantageous — in any case we are not re- 
sponsible for it. It is part of that which comes 
to us from Jesus Christ our Master; but yet the 
objections to it on the undenominational side are 
sufficiently clear to demand that we should con- 
sider what they mean. 

" This doctrine of the Church seems reasonable 
enough, as you state it," people say, "and we 
recognize the strength of its appeal to the New 
Testament and primitive Christian traditions. 
But if it comes seriously to believing it, one 
must ask, Is it not in too manifest conflict with 
facts ? This suggestion of exclusive channels of 
grace, does it square with facts, with the wide 
and promiscuous diffusion of spiritual excellence 
as the record of history and the experience of life 
present it? Nay! I must have a freer theory. 
Verily, 'the wind bloweth where it listeth ' — 
so is the movement of the free Spirit." 

Ah, yes ! who could deny it? The Spirit breatheth 
where He listeth. All life is His in nature and in 
man. There is no being which lies outside the action 
of the eternal Word or His Spirit. Every move- 
ment of good in man anywhere is of His breathing. 
Everywhere, under His inspiration, men are seek- 
ing after God, " if haply they may feel after Him 
and find Him," and "in every nation he that 
feareth God and worketh righteousness," feareth 



18 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

and worketh with the help of the Holy Spirit, and 
in Him is accepted of God. Thus, though in 
Hooker's words, 1 "It is not ordinarily God's will 
to bestow the grace of sacraments on any, but by 
the sacraments"; yet God is not tied to any 
special channels. There are no such things as 
exclusive means of grace, means of grace as to 
which one can say, "God worketh here, not 
elsewhere." But this, after all, is no novel con- 
cession. "Deus non alligatur sacramentis suis," 
it was said of old. " His ordinances are laws for 
us, not for Him." 2 In all ages thoughtful theolo- 
gians of almost all schools have seen that this 
truth is involved in the recognition of the father- 
hood of God, and His all-rectifying and impartial 
justice. But then, the rejoinder comes, what is 
it you claim for the sacraments? Just what is 
involved in the idea of "covenant," and in the 
idea of "the household" of God. The state of 
covenant carries us into a region beyond that of 
dim and anxious seeking. It involves a clear dis- 
closure of Himself by God, and, corresponding 
with this, clear and distinct bestowals and prom- 
ises of grace. A household is a place where food 
and nurture is definitely and systematically pro- 
vided. The joy of Christians is the joy of sons 
in their father's household, children of the cove- 
nant. This is what we claim for sacraments : not 
that they are exclusive channels of grace, so that 
God cannot give except through them the gifts of 

1 E. P. v. 57. 4. 2 See app. note 3. 



THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 19 

His love; but that through them only, as elements 
in His unique covenant, are definite graces pledged 
and guaranteed by the Divine fidelity; so that 
the faithful Christian transcends the conditions of 
anxious enquiry and passes into the region where 
he faithfully welcomes the assured gift, and fear- 
lessly uses it as indeed given. 

And if you press the question further, and ask, 
"Does not your theory of the security of the 
covenant involve the conception of 'valid sacra- 
ments ' — sacraments, that is, that are only valid 
when they are celebrated by persons properly 
ordained in the due transmission of apostolical 
authority? and does not this theory leave out of 
account what is, at least in Anglo-Saxon Chris- 
tianity, an immense and solid part of the working 
force of Christianity?" — I answer, We must hold 
to this doctrine of apostolic succession as bound 
up with the validity of some at least of the sacra- 
ments. The idea of an ordained stewardship of 
divine gifts is inseparably associated both in idea 
and in history with the sacramental system. But 
what is meant by valid sacraments? The Greek 
word fteftcuos, and the Latin word "validus," 
have a definite meaning. The opposite of secure 
or valid is not non-existent but precarious. The 
fact that God promises to give in one waj^ does 
not destroy His power to give in another. It 
were blasphemy, then, to deny the Spirit's action 
where we see the Spirit's fruits. It is impossible 
for one who thinks seriously to ignore or under- 



20 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

rate the vast debt which English Christianity 
owes to nonconformist bodies, to bodies which 
have fallen quite outside the action of the apos- 
tolic ministry. But was there not a cause? If 
we consider the sins, the scandalous neglect and 
sluggishness of the Church, is it so very wonder- 
ful that God should have worked largely and 
freely outside the appointed and authorized min- 
istries? We should think it blasphemy, then, to 
deny the spiritual experience of the past or of the 
present as to the freedom of the divine action, 
even when the spiritual experience is only viewed 
from outside. Still less could we dream of asking 
any one who is not himself a Churchman to be false 
to his own experience. But we may ask men to 
be completely true to the whole of experience. 

Now one part of experience is surely the disas- 
trous present effect of our divisions. No serious 
Christian can fail to desire most earnestly restored 
fellowship among Christians. Something is so 
very wrong at present that we must ask over 
again, and more and more as circumstances throw 
back each man upon first principles, What is the 
divinely intended basis or form of the Christian 
religion? And the answer is "by one Spirit were 
we all baptized into one body." The one body — 
you view it in history, you trace it back to apos- 
tolic days — certainly its main lineaments are 
throughout unmistakeable. There have been 
many partial developments and causes of division, 
and local beliefs and changing customs and laws. 



THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 21 

But there is the one tradition of the faith in its 
central features constant and original: there are 
the apostolic scriptures, the canon of which grad- 
ually takes the place of the living authority of 
apostolic teachers, as the ultimate court of Chris- 
tian appeal : there is the system of the sacraments : 
there is the apostolically commissioned ministry, 
with its stewardship of the gifts of truth and 
grace. 1 These, as parts of the organism of the 
Spirit, constitute for the whole of the first fifteen 
centuries the fabric of Christianity. Since the 
Reformation it is not too much to say that histori- 
cal enquiry in general, and in our own days, 
biblical criticism, have rendered it increasingly 
difficult to tear the Bible out of the structure of 
the Church, out of the organism of which it forms 
a part. Nor is it possible to find in original 
Christianity a " liberty of prophesying " which left 
men independent of the visible Church: not in 
apostolic days, if the Acts of the Apostles and the 
Pastoral Epistles and the Epistle to the Corinth- 
ians are true witnesses : not in later days, unless 
we do violence to the existing evidence and make 
of Montanism the truly conservative movement. 2 

In regard to the doctrine of apostolic succession, 
I must say one other word. It has been, in his- 
tory, too much identified with the threefold form 
of the ministry. 3 I believe myself that the evi- 

1 See app. note 4. 

2 See The Church and the Ministry, pp. 207-213, and app. 
notes H and I. 

3 See further, The Church and the Ministry, pp. 72 ff. 



22 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

dence, as we have it at present, points cogently 
to this conclusion : that since apostolic days there 
have been always three orders of the ministry; not 
only deacons and presbyters (or bishops according 
to the earliest use of the term), but also ministers 
of the apostolic order, superior to the presbyters, 
such as Timothy and Titus, or those "prophets" 
of whom we hear in the earliest Christian litera- 
ture. I believe that what occurred was the grad- 
ual localization in particular churches of this 
apostolic order of ministers which previously had 
not usually been so localized, and that there was 
no time when presbyters or presbyter bishops had 
either the supreme authority of government or the 
power to ordain; the change which took place 
consisting only in the localization of an order of 
men previously exercising a more general super- 
vision, and the reservation of the name "bishop" 
to these localized apostolic officers. 

But there are certain facts which have led some 
good authorities to suppose that, at one time, all 
the presbyters in some churches held together the 
chief authority in government and the power to 
ordain, the "episcopate" being as it were "in 
commission " among them. Now this theory has, 
I think, from the point of view of ecclesiastical 
principle, been too much discussed. It does not 
affect the principle of apostolic succession in the 
least. The principle is that no man in the Church 
can validly exercise any ministry, except such as 
he has received from a source running back ulti- 



THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 23 

mately to the apostles, so that any ministry which 
a person takes upon himself to exercise, which is 
not covered by an apostolically received commis- 
sion, is invalid. 

Now, if the order of presbyters at any time held 
the right to ordain, that was because it had been 
entrusted to them by apostolic men. It no more 
disturbs the principle of apostolic succession than 
if your lordship ordained all the presbyters in 
this diocese to-day to episcopal functions. There 
would ensue a great deal of inconvenience and 
confusion, but nothing that would violate the 
principle of apostolical succession. On the other 
hand, the departure from this principle is mani- 
fest when presbyters in the sixteenth or subse- 
quent century took upon themselves to ordain 
other presbyters. They were taking on themselves 
an office which, beyond all question, they had not 
received — which was not imparted to them in 
their ordination. There had been a perfectly 
clear understanding for many centuries what did 
and what did not belong to the presbyter's office. 
This is the principle which it is essential to main- 
tain, and its title-deeds lie in the continuous 
record of Church history. 

IV 

We stand, then, repudiating the undenomina- 
tional conception of Christianity. On the other 
hand, we Anglican Churchmen stand repudiating 



24 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

the claim of Rome. When you state the doctrine 
of the visible Church, sacraments and ministry, 
people sometimes tell you that the Roman Church 
is the only logical expression of that theory. Now, 
historically, the Roman Church is not the develop- 
ment of the whole of the Church, but only of a part 
of it; and this historical fact would not matter so 
much if spiritually the Roman Church represented 
the whole of Christianity — the whole of Chris- 
tianity as it finds expression in the first Christian 
age, or in the New Testament. But the more 
accurately any one studies the subject, the more 
clearly he must, I think, come to see that the 
Roman Church, whatever be its graces, powers, 
and excellences, is a one-sided development of 
Christianity: a development of certain qualities 
in Christianity with which the Latin genius had 
special affinity, its disciplinary and governmental 
powers, but a development which ignored other 
qualities at least as certainly belonging to Chris- 
tianity, such as the strengthening of individuality 
which it is intended to promote, the responsibility 
which it inculcates for personal enquiry, the love 
of the bare truth, the considerateness, the fairness 
which it ought to foster. The Roman Church 
does not represent the whole of Christianity, nor 
the whole spirit of Scripture or of the early 
Church. To some of us this will seem under- 
stating the truth ; but a statement of the truth as 
far as it goes it certainly is. 

Now it is not only the case that the Roman 



THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 25 

Church does not in fact represent the whole of 
the Christian spirit, but it is compelled by its 
principles to exorcise part of it, and cast it out as 
evil. It has committed itself to unhistorical doc- 
trines, e.g. that the pope not only is, but has 
always been, infallible, that Mary was immacu- 
lately conceived, and that these doctrines have 
alivays been recognized elements in the Catholic faith. 
These dogmatic positions it puts outside the region 
of free enquiry and criticism. Thus it is com- 
pelled by these unhistorical dogmas to condemn 
the free appeal to history on matter defined by 
the Church, and to repudiate the responsibility of 
a private, i.e. personal, judgment on matters of 
faith. And this repudiation is bound up with a 
deficient appreciation of the claim of truth, intel- 
lectually and morally, for its own sake no less 
than for its results. 

For some minds Rome is, so to speak, put out 
of court by positive abuses, e.g. the withdrawal of 
the chalice from the laity, exaggerated devotion 
to St. Mary and other saints, obligatory confession 
to the priest, compulsory celibacy of the clergy. 
To other minds it appears a more convincing con- 
sideration that Rome is not, and cannot be, the 
whole of Christianity. For it is certainly true 
that Christianity was not meant to be narrowed 
as it came down the ages, or to become less and 
less applicable for the freeing of the whole of our 
manhood. 

And I want to make it plain to you that this 



26 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

narrowing of Christianity by a development which 
however powerful is one-sided, coincides with the 
abandonment of the ancient rule of faith. The 
ancient rule of faith involved an appeal to Scrip- 
ture as the ultimate criterion in matters of doc- 
trine and morals. Nothing could be required of a 
Christian as an article of faith which could not be 
proved out of Scripture. This great principle 
secured the Church from the danger of an accumu- 
lation of dogmas such as the Roman development 
has in fact brought with it. The doctrine of the 
Immaculate Conception, the doctrine of the Treas- 
ury of Merits, with its correlative in Indulgences, 
have the effect of narrowing the appeal of Chris- 
tianity by excluding large classes of minds who 
desire historical evidence for historical facts, and 
who resent the undue accumulation of spiritual 
power in the hands of ecclesiastical authorities. 
But these doctrines could not have been pro- 
pounded as articles of faith so long as the appeal 
to Scripture was legitimately retained. There is 
nothing in Scripture which can even with specious 
pretence be appealed to on their behalf. Thus it 
is that the maintenance of the ancient appeal to 
Scripture is the main security that the faith shall 
not be narrowed as the centuries go on. It shall 
develop but not narrow. It is by this appeal to 
Scripture that Anglicanism stands or falls in its 
controversy with Rome. Yes, and it is able to 
make it stand. 

We have no cause to apologize for our position; 



THE MISSION OF THE CHITKCH 27 

we have cause rather to be thankful for it. Angli- 
canism represents a combination which, if Chris- 
tianity is to do its work, must exist and be 
amongst the most beneficent forces of catholicity 
in the world. It is the glory of the Anglican 
Church that at the Reformation she repudiated 
neither the ancient structure of Catholicism, nor 
the new and freer movement. Upon the ancient 
structure — the creeds, the canon, the hierarchy, 
the sacraments — she retained her hold while she 
opened her arms to the new learning, the new 
appeal to Scripture, the freedom of historical criti- 
cism and the duty of private judgment. No doubt 
she made mistakes. But in the main she approved 
herself a wise steward, bringing forth out of her 
treasury things new and old. Therefore it is that 
she stands in such a unique condition of promise 
at the present moment among the Churches of 
Christendom. 

I believe then in one Holy Catholic Church. 
This visible structure of the Church is imperfect 
as you see it at present; imperfect in its unity, 
because human arrogance and impatience have 
brought about division; imperfect in catholicity, 
because human slackness has left so large a part 
of the world still outside its area; imperfect in 
sanctity through the lawlessness of human sin. 
Still it is this structure which has been given to 
us, in and through which to work for God. In its 
authorization and in its possibilities it remains 
divine. 



28 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

Can I express the reality of our responsibility 
for the Church, or the limits to our responsibility, 
better than in words we read yesterday ? " Mor- 
decai said to Esther, If thou altogether holdest 
thy peace at this time, then shall there enlarge- 
ment and deliverance arise to the Jews from 
another place; but thou and thy father's house 
shall be destroyed; and who knoweth whether 
thou art not come to the kingdom for such a time 
as this?" 1 That is, first: We cannot destroy the 
Church of God. As that lies outside our respon- 
sibilities in its structure, so it lies outside our 
power to destroy it. The gates of death shall not 
prevail against it; and no failure or sin on our 
part can imperil it. However we behave "En- 
largement and deliverance shall arise to the Jews 
— to the Israel of God — from another place." 
But in our own particular district of responsibility, 
or within ourselves, we can destroy the Church of 
God. "Thou and thy Father's house shall be 
destroyed." And if there is trial here, is there 
not opportunity also? "Who knoweth whether 
thou art not come to the kingdom for such a time 
as this?" 

i Esther iv. 14. 



LECTURE II 

UNITY WITHIN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 

"But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then 
peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and 
good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy." 

— St. James iii. 17. 

Reverend Father in God, my brethren of the 
clergy and of the laity, — The Church, we saw, is 
a visible society; that is, an organized body with 
distinctive rites, officers, conditions of member- 
ship. But the elements in her constitution which 
render her a visible society do not disqualify her 
for permanence or catholicity. Her definite creed, 
her fixed canon of sacred books, her sacraments, 
her ministry, belong to no particular epoch and no 
particular race or kind of men; they belong to 
what is simply human in us; they are as well 
fitted for one age as for another: that is to saj^, 
they are elements in an institution intended for 
universality — the Catholic Church. They belong 
to us therefore to-day, in our special opportunities 
and difficulties, as truly as they belonged to any 
section of the Church in past time. Now, if with 
this conviction we look around and ask ourselves 

29 



30 THE MISSION OF THE CHUECH 

whether the Church here and now is making full 
use of the materials with which God's bounty has 
supplied it for the conversion and edification of 
mankind, or if not, why not, we are struck at once 
with what is obviously the main present hindrance 
to our effectiveness — I mean our divisions. 

The acuteness of the divisions inside our own 
Church is less, I suppose we may say with thank- 
fulness, than it was some years ago. Parties in 
the Church have been brought more together. It 
has been the main advantage, perhaps, of Church 
meetings, whether diocesan or general — Diocesan 
Conferences or Church Congresses — that they 
have brought men of different schools to know, 
understand and tolerate one another better; and 
there is undoubtedly, speaking generally, less 
strain in England among religious parties than 
there was. They are merging more the one into 
the other. They are learning more the one from 
the other. The great streams of Church revival 
are undoubtedly fusing in their result, their issue, 
their influence. In a word, we are less divided 
than we were ; but still far more divided than we 
ought to be. Internal divisions still constitute 
an immense hindrance. We are to consider them 
this afternoon. 



The Church of England provides us with a 
definite limit to division — or at least to legiti- 
mate division — in providing us with a rule of 



UNITY WITHIN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 31 

faith. What is this Anglican rule of faith in 
principle, and to what does it appeal? I cannot 
answer this question better than by recalling to 
your minds the fact that the Convocation which 
imposed on the clergy subscription to the Articles 
of Religion, issued a canon to preachers enjoining 
them to " teach nothing in their sermons which 
they should require to be devoutly held and 
believed by the people except what is agreeable to 
the doctrine of the Old and New Testaments and 
what the ancient fathers and catholic bishops have 
collected out of the said doctrine." The English 
Church appeals in some sense to Holy Scripture 
and Catholic tradition. 

If we examine the earliest document of Chris- 
tianity w^e find that the Apostles taught a certain 
body of truth which was to be the mould of Chris- 
tian character. This was called from the first 
"the tradition," "the apostles' doctrine," "the 
faith once for all delivered to the saints." 1 St. 
Paul recognizes in this tradition a limit even to 
his own teaching: "Though we, or an angel from 
heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than 
that which we have preached unto you, let him be 
accursed." 2 This tradition, then, was the thing 
handed over once for all to the Church. The 
Church was to be "the pillar and ground of the 
truth," 3 because, as a visible society, she was 

1 2 Thess. iii. 6 ; Gal. i. 9 ; Acts ii. 42 ; Jucle 3. Cf. Rom. 
vi. 17. 

2 Gal. i. 8. 3i Tim. iii. 15. 



32 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

entrusted with the task of handing on this tradi- 
tion of faith and life. 1 

If we now pass beyond the apostolic period we 
find this tradition of the faith — which later down 
was embodied in the Creed — being taught in the 
sub-apostolic churches; so that when the Chris- 
tians of this period were confronted with the 
Gnostic heresy, they met the loose and shifting 
forms of idealism which are grouped under this 
name by an appeal to the consent of the apostolic 
churches. "Look," they said, "at the various 
churches, and you find them teaching the same 
creed. They cannot have got to such agreement 
by accident." So Tertullian put it in his incom- 
parable epigram: "Is it possible that so many 
churches of such importance should have hit, by 
an accident of error, on an identical creed?" 2 

This tradition constitutes the primary teaching 
for Christians. Look at the New Testament: you 
find it is not intended for primary teaching. 
Every book of the New Testament is manifestly 
written for the edification of people who had been 
already instructed in the doctrine of the Church. 
Thus if you look at the preface to St. Luke's 
Gospel, you find that St. Luke's object in writ- 
ing is that Theophilus may know more accurately 
and more fully what he had already become fa- 
miliar with by oral instruction. So St. Paul, St. 

1 See app. note 5. 

2 Depraescr. 28 : " Ecquicl verisimile ut tot ac tantae (eccle- 
siae) in unam Mem erraverint." 



UNITY WITHIN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 33 

Peter, St. James, St. Jude, St. John, and the 
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews imply that 
they write to remind or recall or edify those who 
had been already instructed in the rudiments of 
faith and life. 1 The Church, then, is the primary 
teacher; the Church tradition is to constitute the 
first lesson. 

What, then, is the function of Holy Scripture ? 
It is to be the perpetual criterion of teaching. It 
is the quality of tradition that it deteriorates, it 
becomes one-sided. Thus there is no doubt that 
Christian doctrine would have undergone consid- 
erable alteration if there had been no court of 
appeal. The departure from primitive doctrine 
which in fact took place in the mediaeval Church 
was, as I have said, mainly due to the fact that 
the Church abandoned this constant appeal to 
Holy Scripture as that which is the sole final cri- 
terion of the faith. The Church, then, is the 
primary teacher; the Bible is the final court of 
appeal in all matters which concern the faith and 
morals of the Christian Church. " The Church to 
teach, the Bible to prove" — that is the rule of 
faith. 

II 

On the basis of this rule of faith, let us now 
consider what in fact is the doctrine which the 
Church of England sets before us as authoritative. 

1 See 1 Cor. xi. 23 ; xv. 1-3 ; Gal. i. 8-9 ; Heb. v. 12 ; 2 Peter 
i. 12 ; James 1-19 [R. V.] ; Jude 3 ; 1 John ii. 20. 



34 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

1. She sets before us, first of all, the Creeds. 
The Creeds give us the doctrine of God; God as 
He is revealed in Christ; God in His triune being, 
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Also the doctrine 
of the incarnation of the Son of God, who being 
God, for our sakes was made man. Also the doc- 
trine of the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the 
Church — one, holy, catholic and apostolic. Also, 
finally, the doctrine of the resurrection of the body 
and of eternal judgment. 

Now all these are parts of the universal and prim- 
itive tradition of the Church, and they respond to 
the requirement of the appeal to Scripture. We 
do not get them from the Bible in the sense that 
each one picks his religion for himself out of the 
book ; but, taught by the Church, we find them in 
the Bible. 

2. Passing now beyond what is given us in 
creeds, we come to the Catechism. The Cate- 
chism lays down what is to be known and believed 
by every Christian at starting. Therefore it incor- 
porates and interprets the creed. It gives us also 
a moral rule of life in the Ten Commandments, 
with their interpretation. Then a rule of worship 
and sacramental life. The Lord's Prayer is rightly 
treated not as one prayer among many, but as a 
pattern and type of all Christian prayer. And 
the sacraments are interpreted for us in the in- 
stances of Baptism and the Eucharist, as ordained 
modes of communion with Christ. All these ele- 
ments in the Catechism have formed part of the 



UNITY WITHIN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 35 

tradition of the Church from the first; and again 
they are justified by reference to the New Testa- 
ment. The same may be said of the doctrine 
implied in the services Avith which all are intended 
to be acquainted — the services of Baptism, Con- 
firmation, Matrimony, Ordination — which more 
or less supplement, on the sacramental side, the 
teaching of the Catechism. 

3. Bej'ond this, we have the Articles. Of the 
Articles you find a certain number, and those 
the most definite, are occupied with restating the 
truths of the Creed. 1 Four others 2 are occupied 
with laying down the principles of the rule of faith 
— the authority of the Church in matters of doc- 
trine, the truth of the Creeds, and the necessity 
of the appeal to Scripture. Whilst the inspira- 
tion of Holy Scripture is implied, there is no 
special doctrine laid clown in regard to its particu- 
lar nature or limits. In other Articles 3 we have 
clear statements as to original sin, on the principle 
of justification by faith, and on other matters of 
less importance. If you look further you will 
find, the more carefully you study them, that in 
many respects their language is studiedly vague. 
It is the purpose of a dogma to define. For exam- 
ple, when the Arian controversy arose, and the 
Greek Creed was remoulded to repudiate the 
teaching which undermined the Godhead of our 
Lord, the effort was to seize the exact point of the 
controversy, and, by the selection of the most 

i Artt I-V. 2 Artt. VI-VIII and XX. 3 Artt. IX-XI. 



36 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

definite term possible, to exclude and condemn 
what was regarded as subversive of the whole 
basis of Christian doctrine and life. 

On some central points the Church of England 
possesses, as has just been pointed out, definite 
and explicit dogmas ; but in regard to many mat- 
ters which were in controversy at the period of 
the Reformation, on points which belonged respec- 
tively to the Calvinistic, Lutheran, and Triden- 
tine positions, you find that, as a matter of fact, 
the Articles appear to have been intended not as 
definite solutions but rather as " articles of peace " ; 
they aim at shelving rather than defining ques- 
tions. You have quite definitely Calvinistic 
articles formulated at the period of the Reforma- 
tion and Lutheran articles and Tridentine decrees : 
but the Articles of the Church of England on 
points then in controversy lack the definiteness of 
the Lutheran, or Calvinistic, or Tridentine deci- 
sions. And we may be thankful the Church of 
England did not commit herself . Indefinite form- 
nice are not indeed satisfactory. They may appear 
to say much and in fact say little. This is, I 
think, the case with many of our articles. But 
none of greater definiteness drawn up at that 
moment could have failed to commit us to what, 
in the great issue, would have imperilled our posi- 
tion. The moment was one of transition and 
movement. It is very untrue to call it a moment 
of settlement. This is apparent in retrospect. 
What has become of definite Calvinism and defi- 



UNITY WITHIN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 37 

nite Lutheranism all over Europe? Has Rome 
stopped at the Tridentine position? Had the 
sixteenth century the materials at its disposal 
which are necessary for understanding the early 
history of Christian doctrine ? However unsatis- 
factory then the articles are positively as state- 
ments of truth, they are satisfactory in what they 
are not. It is the very fact that the Church of 
England at the Reformation did not commit her- 
self to any one of the three then dominant ten- 
dencies, which leaves us now at the present 
moment in a unique position of hopefulness 
among the Churches of Europe. We are left 
standing firm on the Creeds, the Sacraments, the 
apostolic succession of the ministry; and on that 
basis we are to rise with the help of the clearer 
knowledge we now have, to the full apprehension 
and presentation of the ancient faith. 

Thus for example in the case of the Sacraments, 
if we seek to know what the Church of England 
lays down for our acceptance, you find certain 
broad limits of belief clearly marked, and within 
these a space which is left without further defini- 
tion. On the one hand, the Church of England 
in the latter part of the Catechism, in the offices 
of Baptism and Holy Communion and in the 25th 
Article, excludes the Zwinglian view, according 
to which the sacraments are merely symbols. In 
repudiation of this view the article accepts the 
mediaeval definition of sacraments as "effectual 
signs of grace" (efficacia signa gratiae), i.e. sym- 



38 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

bolic acts which not only symbolize but also effect 
or convey what they symbolize — God Himself, 
according to His promise, working invisibly on 
the occasion of each visible ceremony. 1 On the 
other hand, the Church of England repudiates cer- 
tain current mediaeval doctrines in regard to the 
sacraments; as, for instance, the mediaeval doc- 
trine of Transubstantiation, which is declared, 
among other things, by denying the reality of the 
outward part of the sacrament of the Eucharist, 
to overthrow the nature of a sacrament, which has 
an outward and natural as well as an inward and 
supernatural part. 

Once again, in regard to Holy Orders, the 
Church of England requires the maintenance of 
the apostolic succession. She confines her min- 
istry to those who have been actually ordained in 
this manner. She does not require the reordina- 
tion of Roman Catholic priests who join the An- 
glican communion, but she does require ministers 
of religious bodies who have not received episco- 
pal ordination to be ordained afresh. Thus she 
requires that men should in fact have received 
their ministry by apostolic succession, whereas on 
the other hand she does not require any exact or 
explicit expression, of belief in regard to it. 2 Once 
more, in regard to Confirmation, the language of 
the service implies the bestowal of the Holy Spirit 
on the occasion — the gift of the Spirit and the 
Spirit's gifts — but there is no exact expression 
1 See app. note 6. 2 Ibid, note 7. 



UNITY WITHIN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 39 

of belief required in regard to the nature of the 
bestowal. 

Obviously, whether we like it or not, we are 
left with certain clear limits of belief laid down, 
and within these limits a considerable space is left 
open within which different opinions are permis- 
sible and possible. 

For my own part, it seems to me a very tolerable 
state of things that a Church should subsist on a 
very limited amount of positive dogmatic require- 
ment, on the basis of which the individual teacher 
and the individual learner shall grow together into 
a fuller perception of the wdiole meaning of the 
Catholic faith. 

Ill 

On the basis of dogmatic requirement which I 
have thus endeavoured to state let us consider 
what is the position of the most conspicuous par- 
ties in the Church of England. I mean those 
three traditional parties of which we have been 
accustomed to speak as High, Low, and Broad. 
Speaking generally, their genesis and character- 
istics are sufficiently apparent. The High Church 
party has been traditionally identified with the 
assertion and maintenance of wdiat we should call 
ecclesiastical, sacerdotal and sacramental princi- 
ple. The Evangelical party has been specially 
associated, on the other hand, with the mainte- 
nance of principles such as circle round the doc- 
trine of justification by faith, and the necessity of 



40 THE MISSION OF THE CHUKCH 

conversion. The less-defined Broad Church party 
has had for its most characteristic positive func- 
tion — by distinction from what it has disparaged 
or denied — to emphasize good moral living as the 
one end and test of Christianity: to maintain the 
principle that all truth which is preached, all 
ordinances ministered, are to be judged by the 
tendency to promote good Christian living. 

Obviously each of these three positions is rooted 
in something which the Church of England un- 
doubtedly maintains. What is presumably the 
case is that the maintenance of truth in each case 
has become by reaction more or less one-sided, and 
there has been consequently antagonism through 
want of correlation. This suggestion will be 
worth our while to consider in some detail. 

I will start from the point of view of sacrament- 
alism — the point of view of the High Churchman. 
He maintains the principle that the system of the 
Church, with her apostolic ministry and sacra- 
ments, is the divinely appointed framework of the 
spiritual religion. This principle I will endeav- 
our to interpret, and show its relation to the 
points of view identified respectively with Evan- 
gelicalism and Broad Churchmanship. 

The "spiritual" religion. What is meant by 
this term? In religious discussions among us the 
term is always being used and yet not very often 
defined. In the ordinary English mind the term 
"spiritual" still carries with it associations of 
indefiniteness. The "spiritual " is supposed to be 



UNITY WITHIN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 41 

opposed to the "material," and so to anything tan- 
gible, visible, definite; or "spiritual" is opposed 
to what is " literal " in interpretation — it is meta- 
phorical, and so again indefinite. 

Thus external ordinances, because they are 
external, rules that are definite, because they are 
definite, truths that are exactly stated, because 
they are exactly stated, are more or less commonly 
supposed to be unspiritual and contrary to the 
character of the spiritual religion. 

Now this state of mind is in fact due to a 
fundamental mistake which a little steady think- 
ing ought to uproot. 

To consider the question as a matter of lan- 
guage. "Spiritual" in the New Testament is 
never, in fact, opposed to what is material or 
visible, but only to what is carnal — to that in 
which the higher part of our nature is dragged at 
the heels of the lower. 1 Thus the birth of Isaac 
is spiritual — "he was born," St. Paul says, "after 
the spirit"; while the birth of Ishmael is carnal 
"after the flesh," 2 not because the birth of Isaac 
was one whit less visible or material than the 
birth of Ishmael, but because it came about so 
as to express a spiritual and divine purpose, and 
not as the outcome of mere physical passion. Or, 
again, what is spiritual may be opposed to what 
is formal — to an act, that is, which is external 
only and has no moral meaning behind it. So 
St. Paul speaks of circumcision which is " in the 

1 See app. note 8. 2 Q a i # iv# 2 9 ; cf. 1 Cor. x. 3, 4. 



42 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

letter," that is, in external form only, and not 
"in the spirit," as having nothing moral corre- 
sponding to it; 1 but, on the other hand, the 
supremely spiritual act, the act of Christ when 
" in His eternal spirit He offered Himself without 
spot to God," gains its meaning through its being 
visible and enacted in the flesh — it was an "offer- 
ing of the body of Jesus Christ once for all." 2 
Once again there is one passage where "spirit- 
ually" means metaphorically or allegorically in 
the matter of interpretation, the passage in the 
Apocalypse in which the city is spoken of, " which 
spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt," 3 where it 
is implied that these sinful places have a mystical 
meaning, because their sinfulness represented a 
principle wider than themselves. But this use of 
the word "spiritually" is unique in the New 
Testament, and in itself it only implies that cer- 
tain definite outward objects and incidents en- 
shrine eternal principles. 

Positively, then, what does the New Testament 
language teach us to understand by the spiritual 
religion, as opposed to what is carnal or formal or 
unreal ? The central idea of the spirit is that of 
life: tfre Christian Church is spiritual because in 
a unique sense she, on her pentecostal birthday, 
received the communication of divine life, in its 
threefold form of power, of knowledge and of love. 
The spirit is power: as for the "letter" — 'the 
written laws of the Old Covenant — it could effect 

1 Rom. ii. 29. 2 Heb. ix. 14 ; x. 10. 3 Rev. xi. 8. 



UNITY WITHIN THE CHTJBCH OF ENGLAND 43 

nothing. It could inform the conscience or ter- 
rify it, but it could not strengthen the will and 
make it effective for good; but the Spirit gave 
life, so that the "requirement of the law" is 
"fulfilled in us who walk after the Spirit." 1 
Again, the Spirit is knowledge : as for the ritual 
ordinances of the old law they were dumb forms ; 
they carried with them little information, or such 
information as witnessed to their own inadequacy; 
but the Spirit fulfils the heart of the Christian 
with a joyful intelligence of the mind and char- 
acter of God, a happy insight into the meaning of 
all he is required to do. Once more, the Spirit is 
love : as for the old law, it laid injunctions upon 
men, which had to be obeyed, simply as they were 
enjoined, with nothing more than the obedience of 
slaves; but the men of the New Covenant have 
received the Spirit of God, and, one spirit with 
Him, they act in conscious correspondence with 
His redemptive purpose, and serve in the glad 
co-operation of loving sons. 

Power; intelligence; love; power from God, 
intelligence of God and His purposes, love to 
God in Himself and in His creatures — these make 
up the content of spirituality. But power, intel- 
ligence, love, as they are represented in human 
beings, beings of body and of soul, beings linked 
to one another in outward fellowship, can be in 
no sort of opposition to the world of matter and 
form. So holy is this human flesh, this thing of 
1 Rom. viii. 4. 



44 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

matter and form, that the Son of God has taken it 
for ever into His own person, and glorified it in 
the Godhead. Acts the most spiritual, then, like 
the sacrifice of Jesus, are not one whit less spirit- 
ual because they are external; truth, the more 
spiritually it is known, is so known as to be 
expressed the more exactly; life, the more spirit- 
ual it is, becomes the more definite in purpose and 
concrete in result. The acceptable worship, the 
worship "in spirit and in truth," 1 is as much an 
external worship as that supreme worship which 
the Son of Man offered to the Father in the sacri- 
fice of Calvary, or offers still at the glory of the 
right hand; but it is worship which enlists all 
the full energy of will, and intelligence, and love. 
The Christian Church had very early in her 
career an opportunity of showing that she did 
not conceive spirituality to be in any antagonism 
at all to external religion. She came out in her 
earliest history into a philosophical atmosphere 
impregnated with what is called "dualism" — 
that is, the assertion of the antagonism of the flesh 
and the spirit. Greek philosophy in its youth, 
in spite of its intense realization of the beauty of 
outward form, never succeeded in shaking off this 
delusion : upon its old age it returned with power- 
ful reinforcements and brought it into captivity. 
The reinforcements lay in that wave of Oriental 
influence which in the early centuries of our era 
flooded our Western world. All the then preva- 

1 St. John iv. 24. 



UNITY WITHIN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 45 

lent sects of Gnosticism, and Manichaeism, all the 
forms of philosophical dualism, had this in com- 
mon — they thought of evil as lying, more or less 
completely, in the material world, in the flesh; 
they thought of the material world as too low, too 
vile, to be in direct contact with God or the direct 
work of His hand ; they thought that true religion 
lay not in the consecration of material and com- 
mon things, but in getting aloof from them and 
separate from them. To get away from the body 
was to get near to God, and the highest religious 
state was that rapt ecstasy in which the soul, hav- 
ing become unconscious of all external surround- 
ings and independent of all bodily affinities, could 
contemplate God. The Church's primary and 
great conflict was with this temper of mind as 
represented in Gnosticism. There is, I believe, 
no later struggle in which her true principles 
emerge so clearly, as certainly there was none in 
which she had to struggle so hard for very life. 
The opposing principles came to the front in a 
fourfold theory : — 

(1) that the material world could not be 
directly the handiwork of the good God, the 
Father of Jesus Christ. 

(2) that God could not exactly by incarnation 
have taken into Himself the human flesh and been 
born and suffered and died. 

(3) that the Old Testament, as earthy and 
sense-bound, could not be the work of the same 
God as the New. 



46 THE MISSION Off THE CHURCH 

(4) that the acceptance in faith of a definite 
creed and definite ordinances and definite scrip- 
tures might be good enough for the vulgar and 
ordinary Christian, but the inner circle of the 
perfect and the illuminated, the spiritual men, 
soared above those restrictions and were inde- 
pendent of them. 

To these positions the Christian Church in its 
different parts returned a blank negative 

(1) The whole world, they said, material and 
spiritual, is of one creation : it is rebel wills that 
are the source of moral evil, not material nature, 
which i§ God's work, and rightly used is very 
good. 

(2) So good is material nature, that God has 
really entered into it and assumed for ever the 
human flesh. 

(3) The Old Testament is of one piece with the 
New, and is to be interpreted on that principle of 
gradual development which is a conspicuous law 
of the divine working, and by which the spiritual 
destiny of the universe gradually appears. 

(4) The outward ordinances, the fixed tradition 
and Scriptures, the ministry, sacraments, and dis- 
cipline of the Church, are part of her essence and 
belong to her glory. They are her glory. You 
in the pagan world, or you who borrow the pagan 
principle, may have one sort of religion for the 
intellectual and another for the simple. But it 
is the glory of our religion that she puts them on 
the same basis ; declares every man susceptible of 



UNITY WITHIN THE CHUKCH OF ENGLAND 47 

spiritual perfection, and holds them altogether 
from birth to death — high and low, rich and 
poor, one with another. 1 

Life in God, knowledge of God, communion 
with God, may be to the pagan only the ultimate 
goal of the rapt ecstatic, or the privilege of a 
philosophic self-abstraction from the things of 
sense possible to a very few : we say to all men. 
Take it as the gift of God, made tangible and 
visible in common ordinances ; the submitting to 
be taught a creed, the reception of a washing of 
water and a laying on of hands ; the common par- 
taking of bread and wine, these are simple unos- 
tentatious acts, which all are capable of, which all 
can approach. But through these common things 
of the common world our Gocl, who took, and 
wears, our common flesh, still communicates His 
hidden essence. 

This was the boast of the Church; and these 
sacramental principles, we are bound to note, 
antedated long the development of ritual. Elab- 
orate ritual is to the Catholic Churchman, who 
knows his principles, never more than a matter of 
variable expediency. At least, in early clays a 
Christian like Tertullian was not less sacramental 
for being somewhat puritanical. People are scan- 
dalized, he says, by the simplicity of our sacra- 
ments : they contrast the commonness of the means 
with the greatness of the gift promised. The 
heathen rites, on the other hand, gain imposing- 
1 See app. note 9. 



48 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

ness by pomp. But with us a man descends into 
the water, and a few words are spoken, and he is 
washed, and there is no apparatus or elaboration ; 
and for this very reason it seems improbable that 
the gift of eternal life should have been conveyed. 
But what a miserable incredulity, cries Tertullian, 
have we here, which denies to God His proper 
attributes — simplicity and power ! 1 

The Church then is the home of the spiritual 
religion because she, in special and pre-eminent 
sense, is endowed with the Spirit of Christ, the 
Spirit of power and intelligence and love. And 
the manifold gifts of this Spirit are distributed in 
such a way as befits the "household of God," in 
which men are to be "fed with their portion of 
meat in due season." Each stage of life has its 
special need: each special need has its appropri- 
ate gift; and the appropriate gift has its ordained 
channel: all is ordered and simple as befits a 
household of security and peace. The beginning 
of the new life, which Christianity perpetuates 
from Christ, lies in that regenerating act of God 
upon the soul, in which by the Holy Spirit's 
action it is united to Christ and admitted into the 
fellowship of His holy body; and this regenerating 
act is ministered through an outward channel 
which is symbolical and also more, the ordinance 
of washing, which symbolizes and also conveys 
the cleansing gift of the new life. And next to 
birth comes strengthening. The strength of the 

1 See app. note 10. 



UNITY WITHIN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 49 

Christian, as also his consecration to share in the 
priesthood and royalty of Christ, lies in the inward 
presence of the Holy Ghost, and this gift of the 
Holy Ghost is communicated since apostolic daj^s 
by the laying on of hands. And the life imparted 
must be nourished : and again the perpetual nour- 
ishing of the new life out of the fulness of the 
Christ is effected through the operation , of the 
Holy Ghost upon the simple symbolical elements 
of bread and wine, mingling the heavenly with 
the earthly things. 

It is by the same principle that the general 
human instinct which is recognized in Christian 
marriage has its benediction in a special ordinance 
giving definiteness and sanctity to the mutual 
engagements of man and wife. So also that orig- 
nal distinction in the Christian society of the 
pastor and the flock is emphasized by a special 
ordination which solemnly conveys in outward 
form the consecrating and empowering of the man 
to his share in the apostolic ministry; and through 
the outward form is pledged the accompaniment 
of the inward qualifying gift. Once more, the 
scandalous sin which outrages the Christian com- 
munity, or the secret sin which burdens the 
troubled and perplexed conscience, has its appro- 
priate remedy in the special discipline of peni- 
tence, which, first public and then private, at one 
time voluntary, at another compulsory, at one time 
occasional, at another normal, has ever remained a 
permanent fact of the Church tradition — -an out- 



50 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

ward ceremony of penitence and restoration, which 
is accompanied by a spiritual and heavenly acquit- 
tal, and is a part of that rich storage of graces 
with which the Church encompasses our varying 
needs, and leads us on from the font where she 
has baptized us to the death-bed where she still 
with holy rites ushers us into the unseen world. 
The Church is the home of the Spirit, whose man- 
ifold gifts are ordered and distributed in corre- 
spondence with our advancing needs: as she is 
also the home of a definite disclosure of God, Who 
has communicated Himself to man, and revealed 
Himself in the person of His Son. 1 

This idea of the Church, as one states it, seems 
most credible, most natural. The strength of its 
appeal to tradition, to the earliest traditions of 
many Churches, is undoubted. Its sanction, in 
the language of the New Testament, is hardly 
more open to question; while, once again, it is in 
conspicuous agreement with the needs of men, 
and with what one may call the principle of the 
Incarnation — the dignity which the Incarnation 
gives to material things. But there is no idea so 
true as not to admit of being abused. And, in 
fact, this Church idea has so degenerated at times 
into formalism, or materialism, or tyranny, as to 
account for, if not wholly to justify, reactions — 
reactions which are one-sided. It is only so that 
it could have come about — as conspicuously it 
has come about in our own country — that St. 
1 See app. note 11. 



UNITY WITHIN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 51 

Paul's doctrine of Justification by Faith could be 
put into opposition to what is also St. Paul's own 
doctrine of Church and Sacraments, 1 and identified 
with a party of its own, while it has been left to 
another less defined party to reiterate that all reli- 
gion has after all no other end or test than the 
production of good living. What is it but a mis- 
erable and foolish one-sidedness that can ever have 
put these truths into antagonism one to another? 
For St. Paul's doctrine of Justification by Faith, 
what is it? It means that what justifies a man, 
or puts him into a relation of acceptance with 
God, is not anything material, or external, like 
circumcision, or any methodical observance of a 
prescribed rule like the Jewish Law, but some- 
thing more true to man's fundamental dependence 
upon God; it is the surrender of man's being into 
the hand of God considered as making in Christ 
the simple offer of His love. Wearied with his 
efforts to justify himself, wearied with his own 
false independence, man at last, within or without 
the discipline of the Jewish Law, learns to find 
his true peace in surrendering at discretion to 
God, and simply accepting the offer of His love. 
This is justifying faith; it establishes the right 
relation of the soul to God. But it is the begin- 
ning, not the end, of that relation. The man 
grows "from faith to faith"; or (again in St. 
Paul's words) he "has access by faith into that 

1 See Rom. vi. 3 ; Tit. iii. 5 ; Acts xix. 1-7 ; 1 Cor. x. 16 ; xi. 
23-34 ; 2 Tim. i. 6. 



52 THE MISSION OF THE CHUKCH 

grace wherein" for the future "he stands." 1 
That is, the believing soul, whose simple sur- 
render to God's promises has removed all the 
obstacles to his justification, is baptized in the 
"bath of regeneration," "baptized into Christ." 
He receives the Spirit, he enters into the com- 
munion of the body and blood of Christ. In this 
new position, the function of his faith is changed. 
Intellectually it dwells upon the person of the 
Redeemer, and passes from faith into knowledge; 
morally, it keeps hold of God who has appre- 
hended the soul; also it becomes a perpetual cor- 
respondence with the movements of the Spirit 
whom it has received; a perpetual assimilation, 
manducation, appropriation of spiritual gifts. 

Christians in the New Testament are never 
regarded as persons who need to ask for the Spirit 
as if they had not already received Him ; but they 
are called upon to stir up, to use the gift which is 
already in them, or to abstain from grieving the 
Spirit whom they already possess. 2 The function 
of faith in the Christian life is to draw upon or 
realize its existing resources. 

But all this doctrine of faith is in no kind of 
antagonism to the doctrine of the Church and the 
sacraments, rightly understood. Everywhere life 
and growth consists in an appropriation by an 
organism of what is supplied to it from without. 
This holds good in the spiritual life. The Church 
is, in recent language, the environment of the 
1 Rom. i. 17 ; v. 2. 2 See app. note 12. 






UNITY WITHIN THE CHUKCH OF ENGLAND 53 

soul, the sacraments constitute the external supply. 
The supply is real. The sacramental gifts are 
valid through the Spirit's action without any 
effort on our part. They are God's gifts simply. 
But their whole effect on us depends on the degree 
of assimilative and appropriative effort — the de- 
gree of faith — which we exercise. According to 
our faith is it clone to us. This was the law of 
Christ's physical healings during His life on 
earth. The instrument of healing was the power 
or virtue which went out from His sacred person, 
but the effect in each case was dependent on the 
response of faith. Where there was no faith, 
there was no healing. According to their faith it 
w^as done to them. Their faith it was that made 
them whole. So it is with our Lord's work of 
spiritual re-creation now that He is at the right 
hand of God. The restorative power, of which 
His sacraments are the ordained channels, depends 
for its efficacy in each case (not for its reality, I 
say, but for its effect) on the response of faith. 
Nor is it that the gift from without is God's, and 
the response from within simpty our own act. 
No! Within us and without it is the Spirit's 
action. From without He comes to us with gifts 
of grace in all the organized system of His 
Church: within us He works to quicken our 
coldness, and to overcome our wilfulness, till we 
exhibit the free and eager response of a converted 
heart to the offer of God. And all the external 
supply of grace, and all the inner response of faith, 



54 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

is but a means to that which is the only end of all 
religion — the renewal of the soul, of the whole 
man into the image of Him who created it. 

Brethren, need we be for ever in reactions ? Let 
us who believe profoundly in the sacraments see 
to it that we never let them, so far as lies in us, 
be spoken of, or treated, or used as charms. Let 
us give no countenance, for instance, to any use 
of baptism such as would allow children, who are 
not in immediate danger of death, to be baptized 
when there is no fair prospect of their being 
brought up to understand the meaning of their 
Christian vocation — a practice, I believe, utterly 
contrary to fundamental Christian principles. 1 Let 
us see to it that on our side there is no failure to 
preach the necessity of the faith which alone jus- 
tifies, and of the converted will. Let us see to it 
that we never allow in our thoughts or our lan- 
guage any other measure of ecclesiastical success 
than the promotion of holiness, the promotion of 
goodness, in the actual lives of men. Let us see 
to it we are not one-sided; and then we may have 
better hopes of reunion among ourselves in our 
own Church of England. For to St. Paul the 
three aspects of truth which, more or less roughly, 
have been identified with three parties in our 
Church, are not opposites but correlatives. Three 
times he states the essence of the true religion in 
antithesis to the externalism of the Judaists, and 
three times in different terms. "Circumcision," 
1 See app. note 13. 



UNITY WITHIN THE CHUKCH OF ENGLAND 55 

he cries three times over, 1 "is nothing, and uncir- 
cumcision is nothing, but . . . faith working by- 
love." Do you ask what is the essence of true 
religion viewed as the response of man to God? 
It is operative faith. And again " . . . the keep- 
ing of the commandments of God." Do you ask 
what is true religion considered in its end and 
fruit ? It is actual conformity of our lives to the 
divine requirements. But once again " . . . a 
new creature." Do you ask what is the essence 
of true religion considered from the side of God? 
It is that new creative act — the new creative act 
of grace — which in all its stages finds its expres- 
sion in the Church, and its instruments in the 
sacraments. The system of grace, the response 
of faith, the result in obedience — brethren, these 
are not opposites; they are the correlatives the 
one of the other. They are all of the essence of 
the one spiritual religion. 

IV 

Let me summarize the conclusions to which I 
have endeavoured to lead you. 

1. The Church of England has certainly a 
dogmatic basis. Any one who would dissolve 
that basis of dogma — for example bj suggesting 
that men should be admitted to the ministry who 
do not in simplicity of heart hold the Creed — 
is undermining thereby the basis of our religion 
1 Gal. v. 6 ; vi. 15 ; 1 Cor. vii. 19. 



56 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

as a whole ; for our religion rests upon the word 
of God, the self-revelation of God incarnate in the 
person of Jesus Christ. 

2. The Church of England insists upon a 
limited amount of dogma, and beyond that admits 
a considerable degree of divergence of opinion. 
It seems to me very possible that this is the ideal 
of Church government ; — that whilst it was nec- 
essary there should be certain definitions, and 
that the limits of Church communion should be 
laid down up to a certain point, possibly it was 
not desirable that exact definition should proceed 
far. In matters of ordinary civil government, we 
recognize that some external legislation is neces- 
sary, but over-legislation we think a bad thing. 
The same may be the ideal in Church government 
also. In any case it is the fact that the Church 
of England, in Creed, Catechism, and Articles, 
fairly interpreted, makes certain dogmatic claims ; 
and beyond the point to which they extend admits 
of a considerable degree of divergent opinion. 

3. Beyond the point to which the dogmatic 
requirement reaches we are still responsible; re- 
sponsible for completeness of knowledge and of 
teaching. Each one of us starts with certain fa- 
vourite doctrines and views of truth. There are 
parts of the Bible we like to read; parts about 
which we feel uncomfortable. Starting with such 
predilections we are, I say, responsible for advanc- 
ing, by prayer and efforts of spiritual apprehen- 
sion, till those parts of truth least congenial to 



UNITY WITHIN THE CHUECH OF ENGLAND 57 

our nature are really appropriated. We are to put 
ourselves to school impartially at each of the 
books of the New Testament. We are to grow to 
an intelligent grasp upon the Catholic faith, and 
to remember that we are the merest slaves if we 
are satisfied with bare orthodoxy. What is actu- 
ally prescribed is but the starting-point for spirit- 
ual apprehension. 

4. The temper of theology ought to be the 
temper of appreciation. A great deal in life 
depends upon the temper of mind in which we 
approach the opinions of others ; upon whether we 
endeavour to see as much good in them as possi- 
ble, or, on the other hand, approach them in the 
attitude of criticism, to find what we can take 
hold of and find fault with. And of these two 
tempers of mind there is no doubt which is the 
more Christian; for "the wisdom that is from 
above is first pure, then peaceable, considerate, 
persuasible, full of mercy and good fruits, without 
partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit 
of righteousness is sown in peace by them that 
make peace." 



LECTURE III 

THE RELATION OF THE CHURCH TO INDEPENDENT 
AND HOSTILE OPINION 

"Therefore, seeing we have this ministry, as we have re- 
ceived mercy we faint not. But have renounced the hidden 
things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the 
word of God deceitfully ; but by manifestation of the truth 
commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of 
God." — 2 Cor. iv. 1, 2. 

Reverend Father in God, my brethren of the 
clergy and of the laity, — We have been occupied 
in considering the divine mission of the Church 
as a whole, and the doctrinal basis on which we 
rest in the Church of England in particular ; this 
afternoon we are to go on to consider the relation 
in which we stand towards independent or hostile 
forms of thought in the world without us. 

What in general is to be our attitude towards 
opposition ? Is it to be in the main an attitude of 
controversj^ ? I answer, no. I remember when I 
was being ordained priest, the late Bishop of 
Oxford was interpreting to the candidates for 
ordination St. Paul's advice to Timothy and Titus 
— "Let no man despise thee," "let no man de- 

58 



ITS RELATION TO INDEPENDENT OPINION 59 

spise thy youth"; and he said this did not mean 
that we were to go about asserting ourselves every- 
where, bat that it did mean that we were to be the 
sort of men whom people could not despise. Now 
this lesson for the individual priest applies also to 
the Church. u Let no man despise her." This does 
not mean that she is to be towards all alien or 
independent societies in a perpetual attitude of 
controversy and self-assertion ; but that living by 
her own proper principles, she is to be her true 
self, the sort of body, having for her representa- 
tives the sort of men, that people cannot despise. 
We must bear our witness, teach the truth com- 
mitted to us, and do our duty; and certain it is 
that by teaching positively what we have to teach, 
and being positively what God means us to be, we 
shall find ourselves in the right relation towards 
hostile or alien modes of thought. 



We are to teach positively what we have to 
teach. On this some emphasis needs to be laid. 
One often hears alarming things said about the 
forces opposed to us. People get into a condition 
of panic and express their alarm by denunciation ; 
but in fact, our strength lies in looking to our 
own household, and setting it in order. For 
example, one sometimes hears alarming things 
said about the progress of the Roman Church in 
England. I do not believe, in fact, that the 



60 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

Roman Church in England, as judged by its own 
statistics, can be said to advance. But, from time 
to time, you hear no doubt of people becoming 
Roman Catholics. Now when you inquire into 
such cases, or have the circumstances brought 
under your notice, you find generally that the 
cause of such secessions, at least among the laity, 
lies in our not having done our duty by them in 
the Church — in the Church of the place where 
they lived not having really shepherded them. 
Either the penitent soul was not quite frankly 
offered those opportunities of confession which the 
Prayer-book would desire that it should be given; 
or the anxious and inquiring spirit was not met 
with the advice and solicitude which it had a right 
to ask for. It was either that we clergy met some 
suggested "difficulty" by ridicule or evasion, not 
being ourselves sufficiently equipped to give the 
advice or counsel needed, or that they of the laity 
had not, in fact, been instructed as they ought to 
have been in the case of which we have no kind of 
reason to be ashamed — the case, positive and 
negative, for the Church of England. 

If you turn in another direction, and dwell upon 
the rise and progress of Nonconformity, there can 
be no question at all — it is, in fact, hardly ques- 
tioned — that it was due in the past, not to any 
spirit of schism, but, at least in the great majority 
of instances, to the fact that the Anglican Church 
was not behaving as the true mother of the people. 
You know this was the case in the Church of 



ITS RELATION TO INDEPENDENT OPINION 61 

Wales. Let her become again but the true mother 
in Israel, and we may be quite sure that gradually 
— not at once, for evils of long standing are not 
rectified at once — the children will come to recog- 
nize their mother. 

I say then that the prevalence of forms of 
thought or belief alien or hostile to the Church of 
England, is to lead'us, first of all, to be more true 
to our own principles, and to teach with more 
positive plainness what the Church commissions 
us to teach. We are not to be denunciatory, but 
positive. But to be this involves a good deal of 
study, thought, and prayer. It is easy to indulge 
in vague denunciations in the pulpit; and easy 
again to give ourselves to general moral exhorta- 
tion. Our people are given too much vague 
denunciation of what is, or is supposed to be, evil, 
and they are too much exhorted. What they need 
is to be taught positively, clearly, and scriptur- 
ally. I am sure there is a danger at present that 
advance in the conduct of services, advance in 
ritual, should outrun the real advance in positive 
teaching. No one who is wise would undervalue 
reverent worship. I may remind you of the sen- 
tence of Hooker: "Duties of religion performed 
by whole societies of men ought to have in them, 
according to our power, a sensible excellency cor- 
respondent to the majesty of him whom we wor- 
ship." Who could deny this? But there is a 
danger that solicitude about services should out- 
run solicitude about teaching, and that we should 



62 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

be over-easily satisfied with "getting a good ser- 
vice." Let me exemplify the lack of positive 
teaching in the matter of Holy Communion. 

An exhortation to Communion is introduced 
constantly at the end of a sermon. But what is 
the use of such reiterated parenthetic exhortations ? 
People will be ready enough to come to Com- 
munion if they understand what its inestimable 
benefits are. But in fact they do not understand 
the scope of the Eucharist as communion, as sacri- 
fice, as worship. If they are to understand it, we 
must not be satisfied with a parenthetic reference, 
but must supply thorough and systematic teach- 
ing. We ought to devote entire sermons to par- 
ticular subjects, not selected in accordance with 
our own proclivities, but following impartially 
the order of teaching suggested by the Creed and 
Catechism, always supporting the teaching of the 
Church by constant and obvious reference to Holy 
Scripture — "teaching out of the Bible." To do 
this involves study on our part. It is only by 
study that we can do our duty. And it is all- 
important that our teaching should be, not accord- 
ing to the partiality of the individual, but, fully 
and systematically, the whole of what the Church 
puts into our hands to teach. It has been one- 
sided teaching, or the neglect of parts of the 
truth, that has been in past history the excuse, if 
not the justification, for schisms. 

We are, then, not to be primarily controversial; 
but to be occupied in positive teaching. And yet, 



ITS RELATION TO INDEPENDENT OPINION 63 

without being controversial, we shall find ourselves 
in opposition to alien and hostile forms of thought 
of different sorts in different directions. Thus 
we must be combatants, for we are to "try the 
spirits," and "even now in the world are there 
many antichrists." Do not let us give way to 
effeminate complaints of the forces now opposed 
to us, talking about "the good old times," and 
contrasting them with the. times in which we live; 
for, in fact, if there is one thing which history 
makes more certain than another, it is that there 
never were any good old times. Think, for exam- 
ple, of the circumstances of the apostolic age; 
think of the Epistles of St. John to the Seven 
Churches, or the Epistle of St. Jucle, documents 
which- belong to the end of the apostolic age and 
speak of the dangers which then threatened the 
Church. Were those good times ? Or pass into 
the second century, and study the struggle against 
various forms of Gnosticism. Hear Celsus, from 
without, saying that Christianity was already 
split into so many sects that there was nothing 
in common among them but their name; 1 and 
Tertullian, from within, regretting that " the most 
faithful, the wisest, the most experienced in the 
Church were for ever going over to the wrong 
side." 2 Were those good times ? Or, the age of 
the Councils; the age to which we owe the 
Creeds, strong, clear, masterful formulas? That 
was an age of wild controversy; and, amid the 
1 Orig. c. Cels. iii, 12, 2 Depraescr. 3. 



64 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

din of jarring voices, people seemed hardly able to 
hear the notes of certain truth at all. That was 
not a "good time." How was it with the Middle 
Ages? People talk about the "ages of faith." 
Certainly, there was more credulity, more readi- 
ness to accept what was proclaimed on authority, 
whether true or false; but, so far as faith implies 
some moral effort, there is no reason to think that 
there was more of it than there is now. Read St. 
Bernard, and you will see he did not look on his 
times as good times. Once more, take the age of 
Bishop Butler. "It is come," he says, "I know 
not how, to be taken for granted by many persons, 
that Christianity is not so much as a subject for 
inquiry; but that it is now, at length, discovered 
to be fictitious. And, accordingly, they treat it 
as if in the present age this were an agreed point 
among all persons of discernment; and nothing 
remained but to set it up as a principal subject of 
mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals, 
for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of 
the world." Were those good times? Or, take 
the generation immediately behind our own. A 
good old churchman who died not many years 
ago, used to protest, if he heard men of a younger 
generation complaining of the evils of the time: 
"If you had been born when I was, you would 
wonder that there was any Church of England 
left." It is the fact that in every age we have to 
struggle for a truth that seems hardly bestead. 



ITS RELATION TO INDEPENDENT OPINION 65 



II 

Iii this connection we ought to study more, 
perhaps, than we do the message of the Apoca- 
lypse. It is the book of the New Testament 
which conveys one particular lesson — the les- 
son that the Bride of Christ is for ever passing 
through those same phases of fortune that Christ 
in His human life passed through : the cause the 
same, the seeming defeat the same, the same the 
passage through the grave and gate of death to a 
joyful resurrection. 1 The Apocalypse lays down 
the main conditions and principles of our per- 
petual spiritual conflict. Under symbolical forms 
we have set before us the great drama and the 
dramatis personce. On one side, the forces of God 
— God, Who sitteth upon His throne, the sover- 
eign; and the Lamb, crucified and triumphant, 
God's revelation to men of the victory of meek- 
ness and self-sacrifice; and the seven Spirits 
before the throne, representing the universal, 
secret workings of God; and the Bride, the New 
Jerusalem, representing the true humanity, the 
true society, which God has been gathering, and 
which will be at last supreme. And, on the other 
side, symbolical forms of evil : " The old serpent, 
called the Devil and Satan," Satan setting himself 
up in opposition to God; and the great Beast, the 
beast of violence and persecution, the counterpart 
1 Rev. xi. 7-12, 



66 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

of the meek Lamb who yields Himself to sacrifice, 
and through sacrifice triumphs; and over against 
the seven Spirits the second Beast, the beast 
who represents the deceitfulness of sin, the spirit 
of worldliness and false philosophy; and over 
against the Bride, the New Jerusalem, the woman, 
the harlot, representing false human society, whose 
characteristics are gathered from all corrupt forms 
of civilization with which the Bible presents us, 
Sodom, Babylon, Egypt, Rome — the persecuting 
empire of Rome — and Jerusalem, the apostate 
Church, rejecting and crucifying Christ. These 
"persons " of the spiritual drama are exhibited to 
us in conflict, and the spectacle of conflict passes 
into that of the divine victory. And the wdiole 
succession of spectacles teaches us the conditions 
of our own present struggle — the nature of the 
antagonism we are to expect, and the weapons of 
conflict which we are to use, and the issue which 
lies before us. Sometimes evil will present itself 
in the form of persecution; sometimes with "the 
deceitfulness of sin," no longer as the lion, but as 
the adder, in the subtle influences of worldliness 
and disbelief. And the method of defence — the 
method of the Lamb and His martyrs — is to be 
the method of mingled loyalty and meekness. 
We are to be like Christ, who rode out because of 
the word of truth and righteousness, but truth and 
righteousness linked by meekness. Only through 
meekness can we triumph; truth and righteous- 
ness not linked by meekness can never represent 






ITS RELATION TO INDEPENDENT OPINION 67 

the cause of Christ. In the spirit of Christ's 
meekness we are to bear witness, to bear witness 
(if it be so) even unto death, and in the confidence 
of His resurrection to look forward to the certain 
issue. For the kingdoms of the world are to 
become the kingdom of the Lord and of His 
Christ. Through the grave and gate of death the 
Church passes to her triumph. 

Ill 

We are to bear our witness, then, as Church- 
men, in the face of alien and hostile forms of 
thought. Let us consider this — to-day only as 
concerns our witness to theological truth; for the 
consideration of our moral witness we will reserve 
for to-morrow — first as it affects us at home, 
and secondly with reference to the mission, field. 
First, as it affects us at home. And whilst it is 
impossible to survey in any sense the whole field, 
I would call your attention to four points on 
which, it seems to me, we are especially called to 
maintain our witness at the present crisis of 
thought. 

1. We are to bear witness to the principle of 
faith. People in many directions are disposed to 
disparage faith, and to complain of its being 
required of them. The complaint is in the air: 
it influences men almost without their knowing 
it. They have an idea that it is "unreasonable 
to believe what cannot be proved." It is not 



68 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

unreasonable. And in vindicating the principle 
of faith it is of great importance that it should be 
set in antithesis not to reason but to sight. The 
popular antithesis of faith and reason is a very 
dangerous one, and it is unscriptural. In the 
New Testament faith is opposed always to sight, 
never to reason; and the difference is significant. 
"Faith is the evidence (or test) of things not 
seen." Faith is the faculty in us by which we 
pass out beyond present experience, and lay hold 
upon eternal realities and grounds of confidence. 

But this faculty for going beyond present ex- 
perience is a faculty of our reason. It is in order 
to be rational — that is, in order to give rational 
account of the world and our own nature, in order 
to realize all that our nature is capable of — it is 
in order to be rational that we travel beyond what 
we can see and are brought, more or less fully, 
into contact with God and eternity. 

The principle of faith is brought into exercise 
to some extent in all human life and knowledge. 
Thus the ultimate postulates and principles on 
which physical science depends — such as the 
unity of all things, the universality of law, the 
persistence of force — these are not truths that can 
be proved. They are assumptions that science is 
bound to make. 1 Thus there is something akin 
to faith necessary in the very beginnings of scien- 
tific inquiry. But its necessity is much more 
apparent in social relations. Human life is based 
1 See app. note 14. 






ITS RELATION TO INDEPENDENT OPINION 69 

on the principle of faith. You must go far beyond 
what you can prove as to people's trustworthiness; 
you must trust the instinct of sonship and brother- 
hood. And speaking generally you find your trust 
justified. On the whole, " according to our faith, so 
is it done to us." The man who goes furthest in be- 
lieving in humanity is the man who draws most out 
of it, whilst the most sceptical and cynical is most 
often deceived. In the sphere of personal moral- 
ity the requirement of faith is still more apparent. 
If we would be moral we must throw ourselves 
upon the right, in the supreme confidence that 
what ought to be can be. And faith is only find- 
ing its true home and justification when it goes 
one step further on and realizes its personal rela- 
tion to God. For "unto Thyself, O God, hast 
thou made us, and unquiet is our heart until it 
rest on Thee." Still our faith is rational. It is 
not without reason that we believe. God has not 
left Himself without witness in nature and con- 
science; still more in Jesus Christ. But witness 
is not demonstration. We need the venture of 
faith to "see him who is invisible." Our Lord 
develops this faculty in His disciples — our Lord 
who is the Master of our true humanity. He, I 
say, whilst giving the disciples grounds for believ- 
ing in Himself, and in the Father through Him, 
does obviously encourage and develop in them the 
faculty of faith. We then are not to be ashamed 
of it, or apologize for it, as if it were unreason- 
able. Nor, inasmuch as it is the noblest of our 



70 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

faculties, shall we be surprised if its exercise is 
sometimes difficult. It is hard, as it is supremely 
noble, to "endure as seeing him who is invisible." 
It would not be worth all it is worth if it was 
not often difficult to believe. Nor is it, any more 
than any other truly human faculty, a power which 
we can exercise without God's help. "No man 
can say (or continue to say) that Jesus is Lord 
but by the Holy Ghost." Faith is difficult then, 
and a habit which requires divine assistance ; but 
it is rational. It is rational, I say, because it and 
it alone enables us to give a rational account of 
all the facts of the world, of all that science and 
history discloses, and also of all that lies hid, half 
realized, half concealed, in the depths of our own 
being; of all that spiritual men have shown our 
humanity to be capable of in sonship to God. 
Faith enables us to move through the whole world 
of nature and of man as those who have the clue 
to its secrets; who are at home in it; who are 
"not afraid of any evil tidings, for their heart 
standeth fast, trusting in the Lord." Indeed the 
spirit of Christian sonship is the only true ration- 
ality. 

2. We are to bear witness to the Being of God, 
and that in an intellectual atmosphere which, 
under the influence of a school of scientific 
inquirers, exhibits some tendency towards Agnos- 
ticism — that is, the denial that we can know of 
the existence of God at all, or anything about 
Him. We maintain, then, in the face of this 



ITS RELATION TO INDEPENDENT OPINION 71 

tendency, that we have grounds for knowing — in 
part knowing, and in part believing — that God 
is, and what He is. 

Ought it to distress us that we should find 
ourselves confidently affirming what the represent- 
atives of physical science — that is, the represent- 
atives of the branches of knowledge in which the 
greatest recent advances have been made — not 
seldom deny? I answer, on the whole, no: in 
part because the agnosticism of men of science is 
exaggerated; and when they are, as very many of 
them are, earnest believers, their freedom in the 
facts of science is not one whit diminished by 
their Christian faith. In part because it is a fact 
conspicuous in the history of mankind that, 
whereas the representatives of great intellectual 
movements at different epochs have interpreted 
truly the movement which they represented in 
itself, they have -been strangely blind to the place 
which it was destined to hold in the whole of 
human knowledge or human life. 

Thus the great Greek philosophers interpreted 
truly Greek institutions, and estimated aright 
their positive value, but were blind in thinking 
these institutions final and the last word of social 
progress in the world. The representatives of the 
Eoman empire, again, knew the real dignity and 
value of that empire, but were blind to the rela- 
tive place it would hold by the side of its despised 
contemporary the Christian Church. The Re- 
formers, once again, had real truth on their side ; 



72 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

there were real principles which they were vindi- 
cating, real abuses against which they were pro- 
testing; but how extraordinarily blind, speaking 
generally, were the Reformers to the sum of posi- 
tive religious forces w T ith which they had to 
reckon. What a surprise to them would the 
religious history have been which links their time 
with ours! They were as blind surely to the 
forces of Catholicism as were the Deists of the 
last century to the real if dormant strength of 
supernatural Christianity. Once again, and for 
the last time, the Radical reformers of the earlier 
part of this century set their minds on certain 
reforms which are now practically accomplished. 
They estimated rightly the necessity and the pos- 
sibility of the reforms they advocated; but how 
short-sighted they were as to the good that would 
be effected in human life as a whole by the mere 
external enfranchisement of individual action. 

I learn then from past experience that I must 
attend with great respect to the positive teaching 
in their own department of any body of men who 
represent with tolerable unanimity a great advance 
in knowledge or power. I must attend with great 
respect to the scientific teaching of scientific men. 
But I shall not anticipate that representatives of 
one particular movement are likely to estimate 
rightly the place it will take in the whole of 
human life. Thus I shall not listen with the 
same respect to the representatives of science 
when they pass from teaching science to denounc- 



ITS RELATION TO INDEPENDENT OPINION 73 

ing theology or depreciating religion. Those 
inside a movement cannot generally see suffi- 
ciently clearly what lies outside it. Those whose 
interests are less specialized are more likely to 
estimate the place it will take in the whote of 
human life. 

We must regret, I think, that theologians were 
'unduly slow to recognize the vast amount of evi- 
dence on which reposes the scientific theory of 
evolution through natural selection. But in pro- 
portion as people lose their fear of it and come to 
accept it, they will surely perceive that the claim 
made for it by agnosticism, the claim that it 
enables us to account for the development of the 
world without postulating throughout the action 
of mind, is an altogether exaggerated claim; it 
is altogether to over-estimate the. function of 
natural selection. 1 

Science has, in fact, taught us a great deal as 
to the method of creation — how continuous it has 
been, how gradual, how even tentative — but it 
has done nothing at all to explain the origin of 
force, of matter, of life, nothing at all to dissolve 
the conviction which belongs to the rational mind 
of man, that this world of universal order and law 
and beauty, this world which "while it works as 
a machine also sleeps as a picture," is the work of 
mind and spirit like ours — mind and spirit which 
is the vast whole of which ours is but the tiny 
product or reflection. 

1 See app. note 15. - . . 



74 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

8. We are to maintain a historical religion — 
a historical revelation of God in Christ ; and this 
in face of a destructive criticism. 

In the Church Congress in this diocese last year 
you had a discussion of the Church's gains from 
Biblical criticism. The discussion dealt almost 
entirely with criticism as applied to the Old Tes- 
tament. Now criticism as applied to the Old 
Testament presents us at present with a great 
many unsolved problems and some fairly certain 
conclusions which seem to demand rather unex- 
pected changes in our conception of the literary 
character of some of the books, and of the process 
by which they took their present shape. That 
subject was dealt with from this place at large 
and very ably by Professor Kirkpatrick last year. 1 
We need not suppose, as his lectures sufficiently 
indicate, that the change of position ultimately 
required of us will be such as the extremists 
among critics would desire. The existing evi- 
dence in fact points in two directions. If, on the 
one hand, literary analysis emphasizes the com- 
posite character of the " books of Moses," and 
historical inquiry enforces the belief that the 
Mosaic law was the result of a gradual process of 
development and centralization ; on the other hand, 
oriental archaeology discloses the existence of the 
knowledge of writing, and considerable develop- 
ment of literaiy skill, both in Palestine and 

1 The Divine Library of the Old Testament (Macmillan, 
1891). 



ITS RELATION TO INDEPENDENT OPINION 75 

Egypt, a century before the Exodus. Such dis- 
coveries as those at Tel-el-amarna make it easy to 
suppose that some written law and written records 
go back among the Jews to the period of Moses. 1 

Certain changes, however, will be required of 
us. We must remember, as St. Augustine has 
expressed it, that, if it be wronging the Old Tes- 
tament to deny that it comes from the same God 
as the New, on the other hand, it is wronging the 
New Testament if the Old is placed on a level 
with it. The Old Testament represents the grad- 
ual method by which God led men on, "in many 
parts and many manners " through a process of 
education preparing the way for Christ. The 
meaning of the Old Testament is to be sought in 
the partial witness which each book bears to the 
central truth of the Incarnation. 

Now it seems to me unfortunate that the dis- 
cussions at your Church Congress dealt so dispro- 
portionately with the Old Testament. For surely, 
when we are thinking of our "gains from Biblical 
criticism," our attention is more naturally directed 
in the first instance to the New Testament. 
Surely, it is here that our gains are most conspic- 
uous. Those who are alarmed at the tendencies 
of Old Testament criticism, sometimes ask where 
it will stop, whether it will not go on to the New 

1 On this subject, and on the questions connected with Old 
Testament criticism generally, I have endeavoured to speak 
more at length in Lux Mundi (John Murray, 12th ed. 1891), 
pp. 247 ff. and Pref . to 10th ed. 



76 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

Testament. But, in fact, such a question shows 
an ignorance of the situation. Criticism began 
with the New at least as soon as with the Old 
Testament. The New Testament documents have 
been sifted by the most thorough criticism which 
can be conceived; and, so far from having been 
invalidated, they stand in a stronger position than 
that in which they stood fifty years ago, in pro- 
portion as the examination has been more thor- 
ough. 

Trace back the Synoptic Gospels to the two 
primitive documents which so many critics postu- 
late — the original collection of discourses repre- 
sented in St. Matthew, and the original narrative 
of events represented in St. Mark's Gospel. 
When you consider the Christ depicted in these, 
do you find that you have got any nearer to a 
merely " natural " or human Christ, to one who by 
gradual accretion was raised into a supernatural 
figure ? No : the fundamental narrative of events 
is permeated by miracles which resist all attempts 
to explain them away; and the original collection 
of discourses represents in all its unmistakable 
force the strictly divine claim of our Lord. In- 
vestigation, again, shows us at the very roots of 
St. Paul's teaching the doctrine of the Incarna- 
tion, as a matter not in dispute, any more than 
the fact of the resurrection, between him and the 
Judaizers. Investigation once again leaves the 
strength of the evidence on the side of the authen- 
ticity of the fourth Gospel. And, as Professor 



ITS RELATION TO INDEPENDENT OPINION 77 

Sanday has very recently said, "we cannot help 
being reminded that scarcely one of the discov- 
eries of recent years has not had for its tendency 
to bring back the course of criticism into paths 
nearer to those marked out by ancient tradition." 1 
Certainly historical evidence is not generally 
demonstrative, and the historical title-deeds of 
our faith do not appear to be intended to force 
conviction upon any man's mind; but they do 
support it and justify it. I am sure that I am 
within the mark in saying that in view of recent 
criticism of the New Testament, it is those who 
deny and not those that affirm the faith of the 
Church who do violence to the evidence. 2 

There are other issues, even in the New Testa- 
ment, which are secondary and less decisive. But 
in regard to the central facts on which our histori- 
cal religion depends, the historical witness stands 
with unimpeachable strength. We are not then 
to go about decrying criticism. We are to invite 
criticism to do all it can, and ask only for justice. 

We must remember further that our historical 
religion — our religion which looks back to a dis- 
closure of Gocl, through a historical incarnation, 
in the person of Jesus Christ — gives us another 
great advantage as rational men. The doctrine of 
the triune being of Gocl, which is unmistakably 
involved in our Lord's language about His rela- 

1 See Two Present Day Questions (Longmans, 1892), p. 37. 

2 See this argument at greater length in Bampton Lectures, 
1891 (Murray), Lect. III. 



78 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

tion to the Father and the Holy Ghost — this doc- 
trine of the triune being enables us to maintain a 
rational Theism. Theism requires us to think of 
God as an independent, eternal, spiritual Being. 
Indeed there is an end to the humility or reality 
of religion if God is thought to depend upon us 
in order to have some one to know and to love. 
But you cannot think of an independent, eternal, 
spiritual life in God, if the being of God is blank 
and monotonous unity. The life of spirit, the 
life of will and knowledge and love, involves 
relationship. For love there must be a lover and 
a loved; for thought there must be a thinker and 
an object of thought; for fruitful will there must 
be the perpetual passage of will into effect. And 
it is thus the doctrine of the Trinity, though 
we could not have invented or discovered it for 
ourselves, which makes our thought of God ra- 
tional and real, because it shows us God not in 
isolation, but in perpetual fellowship within Him- 
self. The eternal being of the Father passes out 
into its adequate self-expression in the eternal 
Word or Son; and. the Father in the Son knows 
Himself and loves Himself; and the fellowship of 
the Father and the Son finds its perfection in the 
Holy Ghost who is the eternal product and joy of 
both. 

We are to maintain, then, the historical Christ 
as the disclosure of God to us, and as the founda- 
tion of an intelligible Theism. 1 

1 See Bampton Lectures, Lect. V. 



ITS RELATION TO INDEPENDENT OPINION 79 

4. Lastl}', have we not need to maintain "the 
Gospel " in view of reactions against what is 
called " old-fashioned Evangelical Christianity"? 
This old-fashioned Evangelicalism dealt almost 
exclusively with the doctrine of atonement and 
the vicarious aspects of Christianity. And these 
were preached in a way that did violence to the 
moral sense of mankind. There has come, and 
rightly, a great reaction; but it appears to be 
imagined in some quarters that we are almost to 
abandon the preaching of the doctrine of atone- 
ment and of the vicarious aspect of Christianity, 
confining ourselves to the doctrine of the Incarna- 
tion and its extension in the sacraments of the 
Church. Now nothing that has taken such hold 
of the human heart as the doctrine of atonement 
could ever pass into oblivion. It may have been 
put into undue prominence, and we must rectify 
the balance ; but no more. There are two elements 
in the Gospel: there is first, Christ for us — our 
example, our sacrifice, God's simple gift to us 
from outside ; and, secondly, Christ in us, renew- 
ing our lives inwardly by His Spirit into union 
with His own. 

Now it is not a question of whether we shall 
preach the one or the other of these elements in 
the Gospel. If we would be true to the New 
Testament, we must preach and hold them both. 
For it is Christ in us that makes intelligible 
Christ for us ; and it is Christ for us who prepares 
the way for Christ in us. It is Christ for us in 



80 THE MISSION OF THE CHUBCH 

awful solitude "treading the wine-press alone" 
who lives the true human life and offers the per- 
fect human sacrifice to the divine righteousness. 
This is God's gift to us which, in utter repudia- 
tion of any merits of our own, we are simply to 
accept in faith. But Christ can thus act "for us " 
because He proceeds to act "in us." His Spirit 
comes forth out of His ascended and glorified 
manhood and links us on to Him ; henceforth it is 
Christ in us imparting His life to us and identi- 
fying us with Himself. If then we are to bear a 
complete witness, if we are to appeal to the con- 
sciences of men both as they desire pardon for sin 
and as they desire actual righteousness, we shall 
not preach one or other of these elements in the 
Gospel, but the truth of both. 

Here are four ways in which our witness is 
required: — as to the principle of faith: as to the 
being of Gocl: as to His revelation of Himself 
in the historical person of Jesus Christ and the 
events of His human life : as to the full meaning 
of the Gospel which is embodied in Christ's per- 
son, our sacrifice as well as our example and our 
new life. 

IV 

I have left myself but little time to speak of the 
witness which the Church must bear abroad among 
the heathen. It is the same witness but under 
different conditions — in face of Hindu, Bud- 
dhist, Mohammedan forms of thought, in India, 



ITS RELATION TO INDEPENDENT OPINION 81 

China, Japan, and the region of the Turkish 
Empire lost to the Church, and in face of less 
developed forms of belief among less civilized 
tribes. Not nearly half of the world, we mast 
remember, is yet Christian. It is the catholic 
mission and claim of the Church that we are 
called upon to vindicate. This means that Christ 
is adequate for all races, and can satisfy all forms 
of human need. Already in the history of Chris- 
tianity it has appeared how each fresh race as it 
has been brought within the Church, has both 
itself found its sanctification there, and also has 
brought out some fresh aspect of the full meaning 
of Christ. It was but a very small part of Chris- 
tianity which emerged in the purely Jewish 
Church. The Greek race, with its unique powers 
of intellect, had for its vocation to bring out the 
treasures of wisdom which lay hid in Christ. To 
it in the main we owe our theology. The Roman 
race, with its wonderful powers of discipline and 
organization, built up the mediaeval Papacy, that 
glorious witness to the governing and disciplining 
forces of Christianity. The Teutonic race has 
surely taught the world much that it would not 
otherwise have known, of the power of Chris- 
tianity in consecrating individual character. And 
there still remain great and rich gifts for conse- 
cration ; the subtilty of the Hindus, the patience 
of the Chinese, the geniality and gentleness of 
the Japanese. Here are great qualities not yet, 
except in small measure, sanctified in Christ ; and 



82 THE MISSION OF THE CHUUCH 

we shall not see the full glory of Christianity till 
these alien races are brought inside the circle of 
the Church, to bring unsuspected treasures of wis- 
dom and beauties of character out of the same old 
and unchanging creed. 

Such considerations may fire our imaginations : 
but, prior to them and more simply cogent there 
lies upon us the injunction of Christ: "Go ye 
into all the world," "make disciples of all the 
nations, baptizing them into the name of the 
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." 

Brethren, here then is our paramount duty. It 
is a shame how long, to how wide an extent, with 
what disastrous results, we have forgotten it. 
We are to proclaim Christianity as superseding 
all other religions by a method not so much of 
exclusion as of inclusion. For Christ " the light 
which lighteneth every man," the Word in every 
man's heart, has left Himself nowhere, in no reli- 
gion, without witness. All religions contain 
more or less considerable elements of truth. And 
Christianity, I say, supersedes other religions by 
including the elements of truth which belong to 
each in a vaster and completer whole. It super- 
sedes them as daylight supersedes twilight; aye, 
makes the twilight by comparison to be as the 
night. In part then it is by direct opposition to 
what is positively evil, in part by sympathetic 
recognition of the elements of truth in alien 
systems, that we have to bear our witness in 
heathen countries. 



ITS RELATION TO INDEPENDENT OPINION 83 

And when we think of it, do we not, many of 
us, find ourselves in the wrong in this matter? 
Do we not need to have it more on our consciences, 
and in our prayers, to take more pains to interest 
our parishioners in some particular mission and to 
see that they know all about it? Nay more; do 
we not need to ask ourselves whether it may not 
be our own privilege to offer ourselves for foreign 
mission work? There can be no question that 
there are a vast number of divine vocations to this 
work missed, simply because people never troubled 
themselves to ask whether they may not them- 
selves be called upon to do it. Can I then show 
cause why I should not be a missionary? 

Brethren, in the Apocalypse there is set before 
us the picture of the perfected Church. It is 
completely catholic — " a great multitude which 
no man could number, of all nations and kindreds 
and people and tongues"; it is absolutely one — 
"the city that lieth four-square," and from within 
its walls goes up the harmony of perfected praise. 
Again, it is wholly pure ; the Bride of Christ, in 
white raiment, the perfected righteousnesses of 
the saints. Lastly it is triumphant and acknowl- 
edged of all, as "the kings of the earth bring 
their glory and honour into it." Catholic, one, 
pure, triumphant — we shall behold her, but not 
now; we shall see her, but not nigh. It is the 
vision of heaven, but it is the hope of earth. 
Meanwhile the vision is for an appointed time; 



84 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

and though it tarry we are in wait for it and to 
have it constantly in view. It is certain, that joy 
towards which we move. There is certain tri- 
umph before the cause of Christ. Conscious of 
this, we are to bear our witness, to suffer and to 
endure. It is hard to go on patiently to the end 
of life without letting our ideal fade and vanish; 
and yet it is herein that Christianity lies. And 
for such as endure, as bear their witness to truth 
faithfully and fully in suffering and amidst oppo- 
sition to the end, we know the reward. " Ye are 
they who have continued with me in my tempta- 
tions; and inasmuch as my Father appointed a 
kingdom unto me, I appoint unto you to eat and 
drink at my table in my kingdom ; and ye shall 
sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of 
Israel." 1 

i St. Luke xxii. 29, 30. 



LECTURE IV 

THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH IN SOCIETY 

"For the which cause I put thee in remembrance that thou 
stir up (stir into flame) the gift of God, which is in thee through 
the laying on of my hands. For God gave us not a spirit of 
fearfulness ; but of power and love, and discipline." 

— 2 Tim. ii. 6, 7 [R.V.]. 

Reverend Father in God, my brethren of the 
clergy, and of the laity, — We are to consider the 
Mission of the Church in Society: its mission to 
teach men moral and social principles by which 
they are to live according to the mind of Christ. 



If yon read consecutively the Pastoral Epistles, 
you will be struck with the extent to which St. 
Paul conceives it to be the function of Timothy 
and Titus to be moral rulers. And this kingly 
office in the Church means not only, or chiefly, 
that we are to teach people to be true to their 
consciences, but even more, that we are to inform 
their consciences. For the cause of our unsatis- 
factory moral condition is not only that men do 

85 



86 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

not do what they know to be right, but that they 
have so imperfect a moral ideal. God has en- 
dowed men with a perception, more or less instinc- 
tive, that they must do the right. But their 
knowledge of what the right is — their "con- 
scientia " — is not instinctive. It requires in- 
forming. Thus in fact you find infinite variety 
in the moral standards of mankind: and that 
because God has left it as the responsibility of 
men to inform their consciences according to the 
different degrees of opportunity which in different 
ages He has given them. 

Now we Christians have a perfect standard set 
before us. We have the opportunities of thorough 
moral knowledge. Thus our responsibility as 
Christians is to keep our own consciences enlight- 
ened; and our responsibility as teachers is to 
enlighten the consciences of others. But this 
leaves us a great deal to do. What strikes us, I 
repeat, in nominally Christian society is not so 
much that people do not follow their consciences, 
as that they are so frequently deficient in moral 
knowledge, and more than this, blind to the 
responsibility they are under of keeping their 
consciences responsive to the word of God. 

When we look back over history we wonder at 
the slackness of men's consciences in the past on 
points which seem to us clear enough. We exam- 
ine the instruments of torture in some old house 
of the Inquisition, and marvel how men could 
ever have been so blind to the spirit of Chris- 



MISSION OF THE CHUECH IK SOCIETY 87 

tianity as to tolerate religious persecution at all, 
or, in particular, such methods of persecution. 
Or, to come to times nearer our own, we profess 
the greatest astonishment that members of our 
Houses of Parliament should have allowed them- 
selves to accept bribes almost without conceal- 
ment, as in fact the history of the last century 
records that they did. Or we read the history of 
the Church in Wales, in the sadly recent days 
when bishops were constantly non-resident, and 
we can hardly conceive how such a standard of 
conscience as to spiritual duties could ever have 
prevailed. We wonder at the blindness of the 
consciences of men in past times; but we forget 
that, unless we are very careful, we are in danger 
of exactly the same blindness, and that perhaps on 
points to which the mediaeval conscience or the 
conscience of the past century was more sensitive 
than ours. At any rate it is a constant law of 
moral deterioration, as applicable to ourselves as 
to men of other ages, that conscience sinks to the 
level of practice. 

It is not pleasant to mention particular points 
on which our conscience to-day seems to need 
re-adjustment to the standard of Christ, but I can 
hardly evade the necessity. Thus it seems to me 
a conspicuous instance of moral blindness, that 
people should fail to see that in investing their 
money they make themselves — within reasonable 
limits, but really — responsible for the use to 
which their money is put: that to put one's 



88 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

money, or allow it to be put, into any "concern" 
without inquiry into the moral or social tendency 
of the concern, is to serve mammon at the expense 
of Christ. We cannot, in fact, hedge off any 
department of our life, and conduct it on what we 
call " purely commercial principles " without refer- 
ence to moral considerations. The "mammon of 
unrighteousness," the money that has been too 
long appropriated to unrighteous uses, has to be 
used by the servant of Christ to make to himself 
friends for eternity — in view therefore of eternal 
interests. In buying and selling, as in other 
respects, we are to "seek first the kingdom of 
God." And no one can tell what a difference it 
would make in the commercial world if it was 
known that the ears of Christians were alert to 
the calls of justice — that they would at once 
recognize it as their duty to refuse their support 
to any business the conduct of which involved 
oppression or unfairness. 

Let me take quite a different instance. How 
extraordinarily blind are multitudes of Church 
people, in the highest not one whit less than in 
the lowest classes, to their responsibility for the 
religious education of their children, for seeing 
that their children really are instructed in those 
matters which form the contents of the Church 
Catechism, and in Holy Scripture. 

It would not be hard to multiply instances of a 
defective conscience; but it is enough to notice 
these two, in which we seem to have fallen below 



MISSION OF THE CHURCH IN SOCIETY 89 

the standard of past Christian ages. Who, I ask, 
could read the New Testament for the first time and 
imagine that Christian people, the people who pro- 
fess to follow the teaching contained in it, could be 
indifferent on the points which I have mentioned ? 

II 

How then and on what authority are we to seek 
to instruct men's consciences on the Christian 
moral law ? That law has, in principle, been laid 
down for us by our Lord in the Sermon on the 
Mount and elsewhere, and the New Testament is 
full of comments on this moral law of Christ. 
Further, you find that the Church was plainly 
invested by our Lord with the power of re-apply- 
ing, from age to age, this moral law to the varying 
needs and circumstances of different generations. 
In other words, our Lord endowed the Church 
with the power of binding and loosing. He gave 
this power to the Church in the person of the 
representative apostle Peter; He recognized it 
also in the community as a whole. 1 In what 
different senses the power inheres in the Church 
and in the apostolic ministry we are not now con- 
cerned to inquire. We can be satisfied with the 
fact which lies plainly on the surface of Holy 
Scripture: the Church was endowed with this 
power of binding and loosing. 

And there is no doubt what this means, because 

1 St. Matt. xvi. 19 ; xviii. 18. 



90 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

binding and loosing were perfectly well-known 
terms in our Lord's day. They were terms used 
of the Rabbis or Jewish masters. To bind was to 
prohibit a thing; to loose was to allow a thing. 
A strict Rabbi was said to "bind," or forbid, what 
a Rabbi of a laxer school would "loose " or allow. 1 

Our Lord then endowed the Church with this 
legislative and judicial power to bind and loose; 
and though, no doubt, behind all mistakes of the 
Church there lies the corrective justice of God, 
which He never can surrender out of His own 
hands, yet the Church was intended to exercise 
this power, and that with a spiritual or super- 
natural sanction. "Whatsoever ye shall bind on 
earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever 
ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." 
In a word, the Church in every age is to apply or 
re -apply with a spiritual or supernatural sanction 
the religious and moral truth which our Lord 
intended to be for all time the basis of her life. 

On the basis of this moral legislation, there was 
to be a moral discipline which is expressed in the 
absolving and retaining of sins. 2 The Church was 
to decide who could and who could not be admitted 
to baptism, to that "baptism for the remission of 
sins," which is the primary absolution. And 
when persons who had been baptized were guilty 
of notorious breaches of the Christian law, they 
were to be excluded from the privilege of the 

1 See Edersheim, Jesus the Messiah (Longmans, 2nd ed.), ii. 
p. 85. 2 St. John xx. 23. 



MISSION OF THE CHURCH IN SOCIETY 91 

Christian societ)^ — there was to be a "retaining" 
of their sins; and. again, when the Church was 
satisfied of their repentance, a re-admission to the 
Christian status, or a renewed "absolution." So 
the Church was to exercise a disciplinary author- 
ity over her members. We can see examples of 
this authority in exercise plainly enough in the 
New Testament. Thus in the fifteenth chapter of 
the Acts of the Apostles we have an instance of 
how the Church exercised the binding and loosing 
power when circumstances required it, "loosing" 
the gentile converts on the question of circum- 
cision, whilst she "bound" them on certain other 
points, on the eating of things strangled and 
things offered to idols; and on a sin conspicu- 
ously associated with idolatry, the sin of fornica- 
tion. Or again we see the disciplinary authority 
applied to a person in the case of the incestuous 
man at Corinth. The Corinthian Christians, in 
what we may call the spirit of weak good-nature, 
were disposed to tolerate the sinner and his sin 
in their society. St. Paul sternly rebukes them. 
He tells them that while it is not the Christian 
function to "judge those that are without," they 
were bound to exercise judgment upon those 
within. Thus he requires them to exclude the 
offender from the Christian communion, until — 
as we seem to find in the Second Epistle — he had 
exhibited marks of true repentance; and then, 
"lest he be swalloAved up with over-much sor- 
row," he desires him to be received back, and he 



92 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

himself admits him. " To whom ye forgive any- 
thing, I forgive also: for if I forgave anything, to 
whom I forgave it, for your sakes forgave I it in 
the person of Christ." 1 The Christian society, 
then, is constantly to enunciate and re-apply the 
moral law, and to exercise discipline on the basis 
of this law; to exclude from fellowship those who 
are notoriously living in violation of it, and to 
re-admit them to fellowship when they again 
show themselves worthy of it. 

Ill 

How is it that such obvious' principles of the 
Christian society have fallen into abeyance? I 
would point to two main causes of this disorder. 

1. The first is to be sought in the history of 
penitential discipline in the middle ages. At 
first this discipline had been exercised in part 
publicly, in part privately; later on, for suffi- 
ciently obvious reasons, it became generally pri- 
vate. Still later, this private confession was 
made compulsory after having been voluntary for 
many centuries. In being made compulsory, its 
moral level was necessarily lowered. As a result 
of this lowering of the moral level of penitence, 
casuistry — which means the application of the 
general moral law to particular cases — came to be 
almost entirely what it ought not to have been — 
a negative thing; not an enunciation of how 

1 1 Cor. v. ; 2 Cor. ii. 5-11. 



MISSION OF THE CHURCH IN SOCIETY 93 

Christ would have men act, or of .what Christians 
ought to do; but rather an attempt to minimize 
the moral requirement, to reduce it to its lowest 
possible terms, to find the easiest possible basis 
on which the priest could give absolution to the 
penitent. It was but a step from this that cas- 
uistry should become, what the casuistry of the 
Jesuits had in great measure become when Pascal 
exposed it in his incomparable Lettres Provin- 
ciates, an evasion of the plain moral requirement 
of God in order to keep slack consciences within 
the communion of the Church. 

2. But the cause of the decay of moral disci- 
pline in our own Church has been a different one 
— the peculiar relation in which the Church 
stands to the State, a relation which demands a 
word of explanation. 

As you look at the New Testament, you see, 
without doubt, that the Church and the State are 
both divine institutions. The ministers of State 
are called God's ministers, 1 as the ministers of 
the Church are called God's ministers. Both are 
divine institutions, but they exist on different 
planes, and for different objects; the State to be 
the minister of justice in the society of men gen- 
erally; the Church to be the minister to the sons 
of faith of the fuller and deeper blessings included 
in Christ's redemption. 

Subsequent history has shown how difficult is 
the adjustment of the relations of these two soci- 

1 Rom. xiii. 1-6. 



94 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

eties. At first they were obviously independent; 
and Christians had no doubt at all about the duty 
of recognizing that the powers of civil society, 
"pagan" as it was, were ordained of God. On 
the other hand, civil society — that is, the Roman 
Empire — came to look suspiciously upon the 
Christian Church, an "imperium in imperio" as 
it seemed to be, and in the age of persecution 
attempted to stamp it out by mere violence. We 
know how that -attempt failed. The tables w T ere 
turned. Later on, in the great days of the 
Papacy, we become witnesses of the rival attempt 
to reduce the State into subordination to the 
Church. Again the attempt failed. The obvious 
logic of facts was too much for the theory of the 
papal sovereignty on which it was based. There 
follows another attempt, which had its chief 
expression in England, and especially at the 
period of the Reformation, the attempt to regard 
the Church and the State as in fact the same soci- 
ety in different aspects. Such a theory has found 
its noblest expression in the pages of Hooker. At 
bottom it rests upon the assumption that, inas- 
much as the State is committed to Christian prin- 
ciples, the Church can go far towards merging 
herself in the State, and, in great measure, allow 
her administrative independence to be taken from 
her in return for national position. 

It was a noble ideal; but an ideal on which 
subsequent events have cast a sinister light. To 
how small an extent can it be said that the Eng- 



MISSION OF THE CHURCH IX SOCIETY 95 

lish monarchy or nation has held itself bound by 
the principles of the Church. We live now under 
democratic influences. The law of the State 
depends on the will of the majority of the nation. 
What likelihood is there that the will of the 
majority should submit itself to the law of Christ? 
And if it be unlikely, what right had the Church 
to hamper her liberty to express and enforce by 
moral discipline on her own members the unchang- 
ing law of Christ ? 

In fact, it has come about that the English 
State law, as for example by the Divorce Act, has 
traversed the law of Christ. And the calamitous 
thing is this — that in nominally Christian soci- 
ety, there is extraordinarily little apprehension of 
the fact that, as Christians, men are under another 
law besides the law of the State. They are citi- 
zens, and as citizens they are bound to obey the 
State law in what belongs to State law ; but they 
are Christians also, and as Christians they are 
bound to obey another law, the law of the Church; 
and it is no excuse for them, as Christians, that 
the law of the State does not enforce, the law of 
Christ. They will be judged as Christians by the 
Christian law. 

It is, then, at the present moment one main 
duty of the English Church to recall to the mind 
of her own members, and so to the minds of 
others, that there is an authority committed to her 
which is fundamentally independent of the func- 
tions and authority of the State ; that, in the last 



96 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

issue, the duty of teaching and guarding the prin- 
ciples of Christian doctrine, discipline, and wor- 
ship, was committed by Christ to one divine 
society, the Church; and not to that other divine 
society, with separate functions, the State. 

IV 

In view of the situation and perils which I have 
now described, we have, I think, two obvious 
duties over and above the general reassertion of 
the ecclesiastical principle : — 

1. We must get people to recognize the prin- 
ciple of Christian moral discipline. It is a plain 
fact, that Christ enunciated unchanging moral 
principles. The laws of men, the opinions of 
society, the policies of statesmen, all may change ; 
but the mind of Christ for His disciples does not 
change. He is "the same yesterday, to-day, and 
for ever." And it is by the principles which He 
once for all enunciated that He will judge the 
world. We have to get men to recognize this. 
And in proportion as this is recognized, will there 
arise the possibility of legitimate Christian dis- 
cipline. This revival of Christian discipline on 
the basis of the moral law is a hard thing to accom- 
plish — nay, it may appear impossible, but dili- 
gent voluntary effort can, I believe, accomplish 
it. Think what voluntary effort has done in the 
last fifty years in the revival of theology. 
Whether you approve or do not approve of the 



MISSION OF THE CHURCH IN SOCIETY 97 

Tractarian revival you can learn one great lesson 
from it ; you can learn the almost boundless power 
of a voluntary combination of Christian men pro- 
foundly in earnest. The circumstances looked 
hopeless enough for the revival of definite Church 
doctrine when the Tractarians began their work; 
but, as a matter of fact, that voluntary combina- 
tion has accomplished to a surprising degree and 
in spite of crushing disasters what it desired. 
Dr. Pusey in his old age used to look back on the 
history of his life, with all its vicissitudes, and 
sum up his experience in the words of the Psalm- 
ist: "Thanks be to God that he hath not cast out 
my prayer, nor turned his mercy from me." Now 
we want a similar sort of voluntary combination 
for the assertion of the moral law of Christianity, 
and the restoration of that discipline, which is, I 
believe, a necessary part of the healthy life of any 
Christian society. No Christian society can be 
healthy unless there is some obvious means by 
which those acting in open defiance of Christian 
law shall forfeit, not the privileges of citizenship, 
but the privileges of Christian communion. 

2. In order to this end we need to formulate 
anew, to apply anew, Christian morality: for the 
principles which by word and example our Lord 
laid down for His Church need constant re-appli- 
cation in view of new circumstances. We want a 
new casuistry, which will not be a statement of 
the minimum requirement, but an exposition of 
how Christians ought to act in the different depart- 



98 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

ments of social life. This new casuistry will need 
to be formulated by voluntary effort in the first 
place, and might afterwards be taken into consid- 
eration by the authorities in the Church. 

I will endeavour to specify some particular 
departments of life in which the Christian moral 
law needs to be reapplied or at least reasserted. 

First, then, in regard to the indissolubleness of 
the marriage tie. Here it is true we are not with- 
out quite recent guidance. The last Pan- Angli- 
can Conference, leaving open one disputed point, 
laid down a certain number of clear principles. 1 
Here then something still needs to be done in the 
way of enunciating the law; and, when this is 
done, we want every Churchman to understand 
clearly what the Christian marriage law is, and 
that it is the law for Christian men and women, 
not merely as individuals in private life, but as 
members of the Christian society, who are bound 
to "judge" their fellows in respect of it so long 
as they are claiming to be members of the Church 
of Christ. 2 

And, secondly, in regard to commercial moral- 
ity. That is a matter of much more delicacy and 
difficulty. We know that a great deal contrary to 
Christian honesty, contrary to the laws of charity 
and brotherhood among classes, goes on in the 
commercial world. And as Christian teachers we 
are deterred from speaking out on the subject not 
only by fear of offending, but by a worthier 
1 See app. note 16. 2 1 Cor. v. 12, 13. 



MISSION OF THE CHURCH IN SOCIETY 99 

motive — the fear of speaking ignorantly on a 
matter on which ignorant invective is sure to do 
a great deal of harm. We want then to organize 
on these matters all enlightened Christian opin- 
ion. The first step to this is to form small con- 
sultative bodies of men who know exactly what 
life means in workshops, in different business 
circles, among employers of labour, among work- 
men ; they must be men who combine a profound 
practical Christianity with thorough knowledge of 
business ways. Such men could supply really 
trustworthy information as to what is wrong in 
current practice, and as to the sort of typical acts 
and refusals to act in which genuine Christianity 
would show itself. Such consultation on an 
extensive and systematic scale is a necessary pre- 
liminary to any adequate Christian casuistry, and 
to the organization of a legitimate Christian moral 
opinion. 

Thirdly, we clearly need careful re-statement 
for Christians of the responsibility of wealth. 
Strong and solemn are St. Paul's words. "Hav- 
ing food and raiment, let us be therewith content. 
But they that will be rich fall into temptation and 
a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, 
which drown men in destruction and perdition. 
For the love of money is a root of all evil; which 
while some coveted after, they have erred from 
the faith, and pierced themselves through with 
many sorrows." 1 One of the most distinguished 
1 1 Tim. vi. 8-10. 



100 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

of living men I once heard say that luxury was 
like the strings with which the Liliputians tied 
Gulliver; each thread was weak in itself so that 
any one could break it, but together they held him 
fast more tightly than strong cords. So with the 
little things of luxury; they grow upon people, 
the things we say we "cannot do without." In 
their accumulation they tie society down, and 
make us the slaves of innumerable wants not 
really requisite for life, or health, or happiness. 
We want to re-state the obligation of Christian 
simplicity. We want to press upon Christians 
the conviction that wealth is not a justification of 
selfish luxury, but a solemn trust for the good of 
mankind. Beyond all question, whatever may be 
the function of the State in regard to wealth, it is 
the function of the Christian Church to emphasize 
the responsibility which it involves upon the con- 
sciences of its members more, very much more, 
than has been done in the past. 

Lastly, in regard to the position of women in 
view of the modern movement for what is called 
her emancipation. Obviously this is a matter on 
which the Christian Church is bound to have clear 
teaching, and to make it heard. I believe that 
no society or system could put women so high as 
Christianity puts them, or could give so great a 
dignity to womanhood as Christianity gives it. 
But Christianity dignifies womanhood not by 
ignoring or confusing the differences, physiologi- 
cal and moral, which obtain between men and 



MISSION OF THE CHUKCH IN SOCIETY 101 

women; but by assigning them distinct spheres, 
in view of the distinctive characteristics, which 
all experience at least justifies us in attaching to 
the sexes. 

What is the position of women in Holy Scrip- 
ture? There is the position of the wife, that 
position at the head of the household which is 
held up to our admiration in the memorable pan- 
egyric upon the mistress of the household in the 
last chapter of the Book of Proverbs. Is there 
any position in life more dignified ? Is there any 
priesthood higher than the ministry of the mother 
of the family ? And then there is that ministry of 
mercy, belonging in a measure specially to unmar- 
ried women and widows. These, St. Paul says, 
are in a special sense free to consecrate themselves 
to the service of Christ and His poor. This is 
the second position for women that Holy Scripture 
recognizes. It was the shame of our society fifty 
years ago that it had so largely taken away the 
dignity of unmarried life or failed to recognize it. 
Besides the normal positions of women, we must 
also recognize exceptional cases: — there are in 
the New Testament prophetesses, like Philip's 
daughters. This position, I suppose, corresponds 
more or less to what we see in the case of a St. 
Catherine or a St. Theresa, if not to the extraor- 
dinary mission of a Joan of Arc. These are 
clearly exceptional cases. The position of a pub- 
lic preacher, or active politician, the Church 
would not, I suppose, normally recognize as ap- 



102 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

propriate to women. The inclination to such 
positions she would, I think, with the authority 
of the New Testament behind her, keep under 
severe restraint, and would only allow of such 
missions when there was an over-mastering sense 
of divine vocation. 

I do not want to go into details. My object has 
been rather to quicken our consciousness of the 
moral mission of the Church. But I have endeav- 
oured to specify four departments in which we 
need to think out and re-state what is the Chris- 
tian moral law. The Church ought to be giving 
clearer teaching than in fact she is giving in regard 
to the law of marriage, in regard to commercial 
morality, in regard to the responsibility of wealth, 
in regard to the position and true dignity of women. 

In the past sixty years there has been a great 
advance among us along what one may call the 
lines of personal sanctification, and also in devel- 
oping special forms of religious self-dedication. 
Wonderful, surely, has been the development of 
the nursing profession, and of sisterhoods, the 
revival of spiritual discipline, of the ideal of the 
priesthood and of the evangelical freedom of 
the celibate life. All this that God has done 
among us gives us the greatest cause for encour- 
agement. What now seems to be needed, is that 
we should pay special attention to the sanctifica- 
tion of common social life, 1 laying down in clear 

1 See in the Dublin Review, July, 1892, an article by Dr. 
Barry on the life of Fr. Hecker, pp. 80-2. 



MISSION OE THE CHURCH IX SOCIETY 103 

terms the moral law of Christianity and pressing 
its fuller observance upon the conscience of 
Churchmen. Thus the world will understand 
that, as the Church has a distinct creed and a dis- 
tinct worship, so she has also a distinctive moral 
law for social life, .which is to be her character- 
istic mark in all sorts of societies and under all 
sorts of conditions. 



This moral law, unchanging as it is, we are to 
seek to commend to the consciences of all men, 
specially by finding its affinity to the moral ten- 
dencies and aspirations of our own time. We are 
to discern the signs of the times, for good as for 
evil: always to keep our eye on the unchanging 
law of Christ, and also always on the changing 
wants and aspirations of men round about us ; so 
shall we fill the office of interpreters translating 
the ancient precepts into current language, bring- 
ing forth out of our treasures, like wise stewards, 
things new and old, commending our message to 
every man's conscience in the sight of God. 

Wiry do we not discern the signs of the times ? 
If we look abroad and ask what is the meaning of 
the current body of right social aspiration in the 
world to-day, you find it such as is not infre- 
quently expressed in the word socialism. Now 
socialism is generally taken to inipty a certain 
policy in regard to the functions of the State, 



104 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

with which we need not now concern ourselves. 
In the New, Testament the function assigned to 
the State is that of administering the divine law 
of justice among men, and for the realization of 
this function among ourselves a good deal still 
remains for political reforms to accomplish. 
Whether the Christian law, so far as it may be 
said to go beyond the law of justice, can ever 
become the law of the State is another question. 
But socialism expresses not only a state policy but 
also a moral ideal. As a moral ideal it is pro- 
foundly Christian, and I believe that the great 
Christian principle of the brotherhood of man as 
based upon the fatherhood of God sums up all 
that is best in the social and moral aspiration of 
our time, whether it does or does not call itself 
Christian. In past ages we have allowed Calvin- 
ism to rob the imagination of Christians of that 
rich treasure, that master-thought, of the father- 
hood of God — His impartial, individual, disci- 
plinary love for all men whom He has created: 
also we have allowed the love of luxury and power 
in privileged classes to rob us of the correspond- 
ing truth of the brotherhood of men — the capacity 
of all men for brotherhood and the realization of 
that capacity in the "brotherhood" of the Church. 
The time has come to restore to men's minds and 
hearts the full vivid power of these central con- 
ceptions. 

It is a department of this work of restoration, 
to bring back into general recognition the origi- 



MISSION OF THE CHURCH IN SOCIETY 105 

nally representative and fraternal character of the 
institutions of the Church. Thus the Christian 
ministry, the Christian episcopate, runs back 
behind the association with which it has become 
encrusted in days of English aristocracy and medi- 
aeval feudalism. It runs back to what one may 
call the constitutional fraternity of the early 
Church. In the Church of the Empire the epis- 
copate, and indeed the presbyterate also, had a 
representative character. Real representative gov- 
ernment may be said to have had its origin in the 
Christian ministry. These Church officers were 
indeed ordained from above, in accordance with 
the principle of apostolic succession; but they 
were elected in correspondence with the represent- 
ative principle. And patristic writers emphasized 
this representative character of Church officers 
sometimes, it seems, almost as much as the neces- 
sity of due and proper ordination and succession. 1 
These are principles to which we cannot return 
hurriedly, and their application at this particular 
moment is complicated by a dominant fallacy — 
the identification of the Christian layman with 
the English citizen. Now it is in every organiza- 
tion of men a fundamental principle that social 
rights only correspond to social duties done. 
Where people are not living by their Church 
principles, and doing their duty as Churchmen, 
they lose the rights and privileges of Churchmen. 
But when this misunderstanding has been cleared 
1 See The Church and the Ministry, pp. 97-107. 



106 THE MISSION OF THE CHUKCH 

away, and the layman is recognized to be one 
fulfilling his Church obligations, the principle of 
representation ought to be applied. We do, then, 
need to watch and pray and labour for the recovery 
of that more truly representative character which 
did belong to Church institutions in early times. 

I have come to the end of that small portion of 
a great task which it has been possible even to 
attempt to accomplish in four lectures. I have 
been speaking of the nature of the Church's mis- 
sion and of some of the tasks which lie before her. 
Before we separate let me say a word of the power 
in which we go forth to our duty. 

VI 

We believe that Christ, on whom our faith and 
hope and love are fixed, is the master of all ages 
and of all men. It is true of every great man 
that he passes in a measure beyond the conditions 
of a particular age, and gains a certain universal- 
ity; it is true in a unique sense of Christ. He 
was very God. He took our manhood into His 
divine personality. The result is a character 
which is truly human, but which has none of the 
limitations which narrow human nature. He 
took those limitations which belong necessarily 
to humanity — the limitations which make possi- 
ble the exercise of a really human faith and virtue 
— not the limitations which characterize an Eng- 
lishman, or a Chinaman, or a particular age, or 



MISSION OF THE CHURCH IN SOCIETY 107 

sex, or class. Jesus Christ is the catholic man ; 
His appeal is to all men of all ages. His example 
is universal; His teaching is applicable to all 
time; and the grace which makes it possible for 
us really to correspond to His appeal, to follow 
His example, to accept His teaching, is nothing 
short of the communication to us of His own 
unchanging self, His own eternal and His human 
spirit. It is the inward presence of Jesus Christ, 
the inward relation in which we stand to Him, 
that makes His example always, for the sons of 
faith, practical and realizable. For Jesus who is 
"passed into the heavens," "made higher than the 
heavens," is yet by the Spirit brought nearer to us 
than ever He was to the Apostles on earth; the 
Spirit links the humanity of every member of the 
Lord's body to Him as He sits in glorified man- 
hood at the right hand of God. The Spirit's 
presence is the presence of Jesus, as the presence 
of Jesus is the presence of the Father, for the 
holy persons of the Trinity are in inseparable 
unity. Thus the Christ, God in manhood, is 
present in the Christian, in as true a sense of the 
word "presence " as that word can bear, by spirit- 
ual force and reality. Christ in us is the hope of 
glory. And He, whose example we have before 
our eyes in the pages of the Gospels is working 
inwardly in our hearts, to purify us gradually and 
mould us into His own incomparable likeness. 
This which is the source of our own encouragement 
gives us also our hope for men. It is the great 



108 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

privilege of the Christian to look behind all dis- 
couragements on the surface of humanity, to fasten 
upon its hidden capacity for God, and to hope for 
every man who does not obstinately and persist- 
ently refuse the divine offer. They are few, we 
may hope, who thus finally refuse God. We are 
willing rather to think of men as weak and wan- 
dering, and to have hope for them. We have 
ground of hope because we know what the love of 
God for each soul means, what is the infinite self- 
sacrifice of the Son of God. And if there is any 
turning towards God in the heart of a man, 
though it be tentative and inchoate, we believe 
that there is eternity, there is the world beyond 
the grave, for the purpose of God to take full 
effect. 

We shall lose heart and courage in our ministry 
except so far as our mind is constantly fixed upon 
Christ ; both as giving us our moral ideal for men 
and as supplying the forces of recovery. With 
our eyes fixed upon Christ, and upon eternity, we 
have justification for believing beyond belief, and 
hoping beyond hope for the souls of men ; and, in 
fact, our power of recovering men depends on our 
power of hoping for them and believing in them. 
If you have ceased to believe in any human soul 
you have, by that very fact, lost all chance of 
helping it towards recovery. Your power of re- 
covering men depends on your power of believing 
in them; and your power of believing in them 
depends on the constancy with which you contem- 



MISSION OF THE CHURCH IK SOCIETY 109 

plate the mind of Christ towards them and the 
eternal destiny which lies before them. It is not 
our wealth, or position, or the historical dignity 
of our Church which will save men. It is simply 
the power of Christ. And, in fact, the real spirit- 
ual power of the Church has not risen and fallen 
with its secular position. There is a famous 
answer attributed, I believe, to St. Thomas 
Aquinas when, on the occasion of some Papal 
Jubilee, the bags of gold were being carried past 
into the treasury of Peter, and the Pope said to 
him — " Peter could not say now, 'Silver and gold 
have I none'": "No, your Blessedness," replied 
Thomas, "Nor can he say, 'In the name of Jesus 
Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk. ' : 

It is in the strength of Jesus then truly and 
literally that we are to go out comforting others 
with the comfort wherewith we ourselves are com- 
forted of God. 1 

And, oh! do not narrow that word comfort. 
We are to minister to the broken-hearted, the 
sick, the weary, the dying; we are to comfort 
them in the ordinary sense of comfort, with abso- 
lution, and solace, and peace. But we have not 
only to do with the broken, the feeble, the ex- 
hausted, but also w^ith the young, the high- 
spirited, the enthusiastic and energetic. The 
mission of the Church applies just as much to 
these as to those. It is as much our privilege 
and our duty to put courage and confidence, and a 

1 See app. note 17. 



110 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

sense of service and hope, into the hearts of the 
enthusiastic and promising, as it is to console 
penitents, and to bind up the broken-hearted. 
" As a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy 
sons marry thee." We must be inspired by the 
spirit and meaning of the Church, so that we can 
present her to men as something that can enlist 
their hopes and energies, and vitalize all their 
highest faculties. "They that seek the Lord 
shall renew their strength; they shall mount up 
with wings as eagles ; they shall run, and not be 
weary; they shall walk, and not faint." We have 
a great work before us ; a work for the doing of 
which divine encouragements are given ; but it is 
a work that needs all the best energies that 
humanity has to offer. 



APPENDED NOTES 



Note 1, to p. 13. 

The witness to the doctrine of the visible Church in Clement 
and Ignatius, " Clement," says Prof. Pfleiderer truly (Hib- 
bert Lectures, p. 252), "most characteristically connected the 
new law of the Church with the two models of the political 
and military organization of the Roman state and the sacer- 
dotal hierarchy of the Jewish theocracy " (i. e. it was to his 
mind an organized, and divinely organized, body) : but the 
Professor is not justified in regarding this as in opposition 
to St. Paul's teaching of justification. See above pp. 68 ff. 
and The Church and the Ministry (Longmans), pp. 49 f., also 
on Clement, pp. 309 f. 316 f. 

The witness of Clement is very explicit to the Church in 
its general idea. The witness of Ignatius is much more 
emphatic to the threefold ministry of bishops, priests, and 
deacons. This he regards (1) as essential to the existence 
of a Church, (2) as based on the ordinances of the Apostles, 
(3) as coextensive with the Church. See Ch. and Min., p. 
300 f. This testimony is quite compatible with that afforded 
by the Didache and by Clement if it be recognized that the 
superior apostolic, prophetic, or (in the later sense) episco- 
pal order was in some districts not localized in particular 
Churches till a subsequent date : see above pp. 29, 30, and 
Ch. and Min., pp. 333 ff. 

Note 2, to p. 16. 

Archdeacon Sinclair, in his recent charge, The Church, 
Invisible, Visible, Catholic, National (Eliot Stock, 1892), ap- 
pears to put the individual relation of the soul to God first, 

111 



112 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

to regard it as logically prior to, and independent of, church- 
membership, and to make the association of Christians into 
societies a subsequent act. See p. 2. " But just as believers 
having this personal relation to their Lord would be in a 
spiritual sense as the branches to the vine, as the limbs to 
the head, so they would naturally form, under the Divine 
guidance, a society among themselves in their relation to each 
other on earth." May I call attention on this subject to some 
words of the present bishop of London in a noble sermon 
entitled "Individualism and Catholicism." See Twelve Ser- 
mons preached at the consecration of Truro Cathedral (Wells, 
Gardner & Masters, 1888), pp. 17-20. 

"We are sometimes asked to think that the Church only 
exists in the union of believers, and has no reality of its own. 
Now, it is perfectly clear that in the New Testament the idea 
of the Church is not that. Men talk sometimes as if a church 
could be constituted simply by Christians coming together 
and uniting themselves into one body for the purpose. Men 
speak as if Christians came first, and the Church after ; as if 
the origin of the Church was in the wills of individual Chris- 
tians who composed it. But, on the contrary, throughout the 
teaching of the Apostles we see that it is the Church that 
comes first and the members of it afterwards. Men were not 
brought to Christ and then determined that they would live 
in a community. Men were not brought to Christ to believe 
in Him and His Cross, and to recognize the duty of worship- 
ping the Heavenly Father in His name, and then decided 
that it would be a great help to their religion that they 
should join one another in that worship, and should be 
united in the bonds of fellowship for that purpose. In the 
New Testament, on the contrary, the Kingdom of Heaven 
is already in existence, and men are invited into it. The 
Church takes its origin, not in the will of man, but in the 
will of the Lord Jesus Christ. He sent forth His Apostles; 
the Apostles received their commission from Him ; they were 
not organs of the congregation ; they were ministers of the 
Lord Himself. He sent them forth to gather all the thou- 



APPENDED NOTES 113 

sands that they could reach within His fold ; but they came 
first, and the members came afterwards ; and the Church in 
all its dignity and glory was quite independent of the mem- 
bers that were brought within it. Everywhere men are 
called in ; they do not come in, and make the Church by 
coming. They are called in to that which already exists ; 
they are recognized as members when they are within ; but 
their membership depends upon their admission, and not 
upon their constituting themselves into a body in the sight 
of the Lord. ... 

" This individualism of which I speak has too much truth 
in it to fail in strength. It cannot be counter-balanced by 
anything but insisting on what the Church of the New Testa- 
ment really is ; making men everywhere understand that the 
Church is a body which lives from age to age : adapting itself 
to all times and all circumstances : finding spiritual life for all 
characters ; supplying the means of grace for every variety 
in humanity. It is for this that we insist upon the succes- 
sion of the ministry, because we find the Church from the 
very beginning flowing out of the ministry. He distorts that 
conception of the ministry who ever allows it to be the means 
of separating clergy from laity, and making men think that 
the great body consists of the clergy only, or that the clergy 
only are the life of the body. The purpose of that succes- 
sion is to link the Church of the present from generation to 
generation, back, by steps that cannot be mistaken, to the 
first appointment of the Apostles by the Lord. The purpose 
of that succession is to make men feel the unity of the body 
as it comes down the stream of history, and, if possible, to 
touch their hearts with some sense of that power which the 
Lord bequeathed when He ascended up on high and gave 
gifts to men ; with some sense of that grace which He prom- 
ised when He said that He would be with us always, even to 
the end of the world ; some sense of that undying life which 
shall still, until He comes again, unite those who love Him 
with Himself, and spread the knowledge of His name through- 
out the human race. To this persistence of the Church as a 



114 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

living body a Cathedral ever bears a silent but visible wit- 
ness ; the seat of Bishop after Bishop, not ruling in his own 
name ; not by virtue of his own abilities ; not giving to pos- 
terity the narrow legacy of his own opinions nor institutions 
that shall for ever represent himself, but each in succession 
handing on the life and power of the Church of Christ." 

Archdeacon Sinclair makes much of the " invisible " and 
"ideal" Church, of which we are constituted members by 
faith. No doubt this idea took powerful hold of the minds 
of the Reformers and of later Protestants ; yet as the 
Lutheran Kothe pointed out (see Ch. and Min., p. 19) it 
does not represent the thought of the early Church, nor does 
it that of the New Testament. It is true (1) that part of 
the Church, i.e. that in Paradise, is invisible to us: and 
(2) that many conscientious good men are not members of 
the Church now, who yet will, we trust, become members 
of the Church in Paradise. Also (3) that all baptized per- 
sons are as such members of the one Church on earth, even 
though they are living in very broken relation to it. Also 
(4) that the Church does not represent the whole sphere 
of the divine action, and is not therefore simply identical 
with the kingdom of God. But the Church so far as it is 
on earth, means nothing else than the visible organized 
body of baptized persons, worthy or unworthy. The word 
" Church " throughout the New Testament stands for the 
same thing, and not at one time for a visible society, at 
another for an ideal or invisible relation. 

Note 3, to p. 18. 

Necessity of sacraments not absolute. See St. Thorn. Aq. 
P. iii. Q. 68. Art. 2. " Deus . . . cuius potentia sacramentis 
visibilibus non alligatur, cf. S. Aug. Quaestt. in LeviL 84. 
Proinde colligitur invisibilem sanctificationem quibusdam 
affuisse et profuisse sine visibilibus sacramentis . . . nee 
tamen ideo sacramentum visibile contemnendum est : nam 
contemptor eius invisibiliter sanctificari nullo modo potest." 



APPENDED NOTES 115 

See also Andrewes in Libr. of Angl. Cath. TheoL, Sermons 
vol. v. p. 92 "Gratia Dei non alligatur mediis." 

Note 4, to p. 21. 

Irenaeus on the elements of the Christian religion. The 
language of Irenaeus, the great representative in the second 
century of the principle of apostolic tradition, is very striking. 
C. Haer, iv. 33, 8. " The true knowledge (the Christian 
religion) is the doctrine of the Apostles and the ancient 
system of the Church in all the world ; and the character of 
the body of Christ according to the successions of the 
bishops to whom they (the Apostles) delivered the Church 
in each separate place ; the complete use moreover of the 
Scripture w r hich has come dowm to our time, preserved with- 
out corruption, receiving neither addition nor loss ; its public 
reading without falsification ; legitimate and careful exposi- 
tion according to the scriptures, without peril and without 
blasphemy ; and the pre-eminent gift of love." 

Note 5, to p. 32. 

The contents of the New Testament "tradition" We should 
gather from the New Testament that the original " catecheti- 
cal teaching " contained (a) instruction in the facts of our 
Lord's life, death, resurrection, &c, cf. Luke i. 1-4; 1 Cor. xi. 
23, xv. 3-4. (b) Instruction in the meaning of sacred rites, 
baptism, laying on of hands, eucharist, Heb. vi. 1-6; cf. 
Rom. vi. 3 ; 1 Cor. x. 15-16, xi. 23 if. ; cf. Acts ii. 38. This 
would have included the learning of the Lord's Prayer, see 
Didache, 8. (c) Instruction in the moral obligations of " the 
way " and in the " last things " Heb. vi. 1-2 ; 1 Thess. iv. 
1-2, v. 2. We must add to this, what I think almost all New 
Testament writings w^ould imply, (d) instruction in the 
meaning of " the Name " — the Name of the Father, the Son, 
and the Holy Ghost. (The Judaic, semi-Christian, character 
of the instruction in the Didache y whether moral, doctrinal, 



116 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

or sacramental, see the Ch. and the Min., pp. 411 f ., makes 
its emphatic witness to the Threefold Name (see c. 7) the 
more important.) In all cases £he references I have given 
above are not references to the teaching of the New Testa- 
ment books, but the teaching which those books imply to 
have been already given. 

Note 6, to p. 38. 

The Anglican doctrine of the sacraments. Nothing surely 
can be richer or better than Hooker's teaching on the 
sacraments in principle. E. P. v. 50, 56 ff. If all parties 
could agree on what he teaches positively, it would be well 
for the Church of England. And it is not to be forgotten 
how strongly, and surely rightly, Hooker, with the older 
Catholic writers, insists, against some more recent schoolmen, 
that God is the direct agent in the bestowal of grace on the 
occasion of each sacrament — "solum Deum producere gra- 
tiam ad praesentiam sacramentorum." E. P. vi. 6, 10-11. 

Note 7, to p. 38. 

The Anglican rejuirement of the apostolic succession. On 
this subject let me refer to the careful language of Prof. 
Stanton, The Place of Authority in Religious Belief (Long- 
mans, 1891), pp. 204 ff., and 225 ff. See also the Catena of 
Anglican Divines in Tracts for the Times, No. 74. One may 
recognize that as a fact the Anglican divines of the seven- 
teenth century admitted exceptions to the necessity of 
episcopal ordination without either thinking their teaching 
on this head seriously dangerous, or on the other hand 
regarding it as quite adequate to ancient standards. Arch- 
deacon Sinclair does not, to my mind (1. c. pp. 55 ff.), use 
these Anglican divines quite fairly. To mention two points : 
they are speaking of Protestants who "want an ordinary 
succession without their own fault, out of invincible ignorance 
or necessity," or " where bishops could not be had." Now 



APPENDED NOTES 117 

these qualifications greatly limit the application of their 
words. Secondly, they show no tenderness at all to schis- 
matics in their own country. If I were a Nonconformist 
I would sooner be dealt with by a modern High Churchman 
than by a Caroline divine, though the modern High Church- 
man taught by experience has returned to the simpler 
ancient doctrine of the apostolic succession as necessary not 
indeed to the salvation of an individual, but to the constitu- 
tion of a Church. 

Note 8, to p. 40. 

The meaning of the word " spiritual.'" Cf . Milligan, Resur- 
rection of our Lord (Macmillan, 1st ed.), note 15, p. 247: 
" An element of confusion is introduced into all our thoughts 
upon this subject by the ambiguity of such words as ' spirit ' 
and 'spiritual.' We are apt to think of them as antithetical 
to 'body' and ' bodily.' How far this is from the view of 
the Xew Testament the single passage 1 Cor. xv. 44 is suffi- 
cient to prove. The antithesis of scripture is not of the 
spiritual and the bodily, but that of the spiritual and the 
carnal." It is of course the case that "spirit" as applied to 
God or to the angels, carries with it (e. g. St. John iv. 24) 
associations of immateriality, but the glorified Christ in His 
risen body is also called simply " spirit " 1 Cor. xv. 45, and 
the adjective " spiritual " (see 1 Cor. xv. 44) or the phrase 
" according to the spirit " carries with it no sort of opposi- 
tion to materiality: that is spiritual which is according to 
the law of the spirit, or the expression of spirit. 

Note 9, to p. 47. 

Gnostic esotericism and Christian universality. On this 
subject see Lightfoot's note on Col. i. 28 ; and Neander's 
Ch. Hist. (Bonn's trans.), ii. pp. 33, 34. The effect of the 
Gnostic controversy on the sacramental and ecclesiastical 
teaching of Christianity appears most clearly in Ignatius' 
letters, Irenaeus B. iii. 1-4, iv. 17-18, v. 2-3. Tertullian, 
Be Res. Cam. 8 and Be Praescr. 



118 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 



Note 10, to p. 48. 

Tertullian on the simplicity of Christian sacraments. See 
Be Bapt. 2. "Nihil adeo est, quod tarn obduret mentes 
hominum, quam simplicitas divinorum operum quae in actu 
videtur et magnificentia quae in effectu repromittitur : ut 
hie quoque quoniam tanta simplicitate sine pompa, sine 
apparatu novo aliquo, denique sine sumptu homo in aqua 
demissus et inter pauca verba tinctus non multo vel nihilo 
mundior resurgit, eo incredibilis existimetur consecutio 
aeternitatis. Mentior, si non e contrario idolorum sollemnia 
vel arcana de suggestu et apparatu deque sumptu fidem et 
auctoritatem sibi exstruunt. Pro misera incredulitas, quae 
denegas Deo proprietates suas, simplicitatem et potestatem." 

Note 11, to p. 50. 

Goethe on the sacramental system. There is a very remark- 
able passage in Goethe's Autobiography (Dichtung unci 
Wahrheit, see Bonn's Trans., vol. i. p. 245-248), where, com- 
plaining of the paucity of Protestant sacraments, he writes : 
" In moral and religious, as well as in physical and civil 
matters, a man does not like to do anything on the spur of 
the moment ; he needs a sequence such as results in habit ; 
what he is to love and perform, he cannot represent to him- 
self as single or isolated, and if he is to repeat anything 
willingly, it must not have become strange to him. As the 
Protestant worship lacks fulness in general, so, if it be 
investigated in detail, it will be found that the Protestant 
has too few sacraments, nay, indeed, he has only one in 
which he is himself an actor — the Lord's Supper: for bap- 
tism he sees only when it is performed on others, and is not 
greatly edified by it. The sacraments are the highest part 
of religion, the symbols to our senses of an extraordinary 
divine favour and grace. In the Lord's Supper earthly lips 
are to receive a divine Being embodied, and partake of an 
heavenly under the form of an earthly nourishment. This 



APPENDED NOTES 119 

idea is just the same in all Christian churches ; whether the 
sacrament is taken with more or less submission to the 
mystery, with more or less accommodation to what is intel- 
ligible ; it always remains a great and holy action, which in 
reality takes the place of the possible or impossible, the 
place of that which man can neither attain nor do without. 
But such a sacrament should not stand alone ; no Christian 
can partake of it with the true joy for which it is given, if 
the symbolical or sacramental sense is not fostered within 
him. He must be accustomed to regard the inner religion 
of the heart and that of the external church as perfectly 
one ; as the great universal sacrament, which again divides 
itself into so many others, and communicates to these parts 
its holiness, indestructibleness, and eternity." 

This is followed by a wonderfully appreciative account of 
the sequence of sacraments, adapted to all stages of human 
life, in the Catholic Church. 

Note 12, to p. 52. 

Christians have no need to ask for the Spirit. See Moule. 
Veni Creator (Hodder & Stoughton, 1890), pp. 222-3. The 
Christian Church has in fact habitually invoked the Holy 
Spirit — "Veni, Creator Spiritus " '• Veni, sancte Spiritus " — 
and such language has a clear meaning in view of the fact that 
what God has given He is still perpetually giving. But the 
fact about the Xew Testament language is as stated in the text. 
See Rom. viii. 9, 15, 16 ; Gal. v. 25 ; Eph. iv. 30 ; 1 Thess. v. 
19 ; Heb. vi. 4 ; 1 John iii. 21 ; cf. 1 Tim. iv. 14; 2 Tim. i. 6. 

Xote 13, to p. 51. 

Infants who are proper subjects of baptism. It is the general 
teaching of the Church that the children of non-Christian 
parents, are not, till they come to years of discretion, fit sub- 
jects of baptism, unless their parents give them to the Church. 
See St. Thorn. Aq. Summa Theol. P. iii. Q. QS. Art. 10. (This 



120 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

decision he bases on the fact that they have not yet in them- 
selves the exercise of will ; that it is against the will, and so 
against the natural right of the parent: that it generates 
scandal through relapses.) On the other hand, the Church 
since St.' Paul, regards the children of a Christian parent, as 
fit subjects for baptism. See 1 Cor. vii. 14. The children 
are "holy," i. e. as Tertullian interprets, "designati sancti- 
tati ac per hoc etiam saluti" (De An. 29). The reason is 
that the faith of the parent offers the child for baptism, and 
truly represents it. Thus the 68th canon (of 1603) decrees 
the penalty of suspension for three months upon any minister 
who refuses to christen according to the form of the Book of 
Common Prayer any child that is brought to him upon Sun- 
days or Holydays to be christened. Besides the faith of the 
parents a guarantee is also provided in the faith of the spon- 
sors who represent the Church. " Children," says St. Augus- 
tine, " are presented to receive spiritual grace not so much by 
those who bear them in their arms — though by them too if 
they are also good Christians — or by the whole society of 
the faithful " (Ep. 98. 5). 

The principle in all this is that faith is to be required when 
baptism is to be administered ; either the faith of the person 
to be baptized or, in the case of a child, of those who under- 
take for him, his parents or the Church. This representative 
faith, which guarantees the Christian education of children, 
is plainly demanded by our baptismal office, as a condition 
of baptism. We violate then a fundamental principle, and 
degrade a sacrament to the level of a charm, if we get chil- 
dren to be baptized indiscriminately, i. e. without reference 
to their Christian bringing up. It must be wrong to put 
undue pressure upon parents to have their children baptized 
where it is even reasonably certain that they will not either 
act towards them, or allow the Church to act, as Christian 
parents should. Some initiative on the part of the parents, 
or some guarantee on behalf of the Church, ought to be 
asked for : see, on the general subject, Maskell, Holy Baptism 
(Pickering, 1848), pp. 336-348. 



APPENDED NOTES 121 



Note 14, to p. 68. 

Science cannot proceed without assumptions. See Herbert 
Spencer, First Principles (Williams & Norgate, 5th eel. 1887), 
pp. 137 f . " In what way, then, must philosophy set out ? 
The developed intelligence is framed upon certain organized 
and consolidated conceptions of which it cannot divest itself : 
and which it can no more stir without using than the body 
can stir without help of its limbs. In what w r ay, then, is it 
possible for intelligence, striving aftev Philosophy, to give 
any account of these conceptions, and to show either their 
validity or their invalidity? There is but one way ; those of 
them which are vital, or cannot be severed from the rest 
without vital dissolution, must be assumed as true provision- 
ally. The fundamental intuitions that are necessary to the 
process of thinking, must be temporarily accepted as unques- 
tionable : leaving the assumption of their unquestionable- 
ness to be justified by the results. How is it to be justified 
by the results? As any other assumption is justified — by 
ascertaining that all the conclusions deducible from it, cor- 
respond with the facts as directly observed — by showing 
the agreement between the experiences it leads us to antici- 
pate and the actual experiences. There is no method of estab- 
lishing the validity of any belief except that of showing its entire 
congruity with all other beliefs." 

I have italicized the last sentence, and would compare 
with it an admirable passage on the relation of philosophy 
to ordinary assumptions, scientific and religious, in E. Caird's 
Philosophy of Kant (Maclehose, Glasgow, 1877) pp. 34-5. 
The line of thought may be pursued in Holland's Logic and 
Life (Longmans) Sermons i-iii, and in Newman's Univ. 
Sermons, " Implicit and Explicit Reason." 

Note 15, to p. 73. 

Evolution and its relation to Religious Thought. See an 
excellent work, with this title,, by the distinguished Ameri- 



122 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH 

can man of science, Prof. Leconte (Chapman & Hall). The 
first two parts of the book are occupied with the statement 
of the theory of evolution and of the evidence on which it 
rests. The third part considers the relation of the theory 
to Theism in general and Christianity in particular. (From 
the theological point of view Prof. Leconte's remarks upon 
the theory of moral evil are surely inadequate, ed. 2. pp. 
369 ff.) 

Note 16, to p. 98. 

The resolutions of the Conference of Bishops of the Anglican 
Communion (July 1888) in regard to Divorce. See Encycli- 
cal Letter with Resolutions and Reports (S. P. C. K. 1888) 
Resol. 4. 

" (1) That inasmuch as our Lord's words expressly forbid 
divorce, except in the case of fornication or adultery, the 
Christian Church cannot recognize divorce in any other than 
the excepted case, or give any sanction to the marriage of 
any person who has been divorced contrary to this law, 
during the life of the other party. 

" (2) That under no circumstances ought the guilty party 
in the case of a divorce for adultery, to be regarded, during 
the life-time of the innocent party, as a fit recipient of the 
blessing of the Church on marriage. 

" (3) That recognizing that there always has been a 
difference of opinion in the Church on the question whether 
our Lord meant to forbid marriage to the innocent party in a 
divorce for adultery, the conference recommends that the 
clergy should not be instructed to refuse the sacraments or 
other privileges of the Church to those who, under civil 
sanctions, are thus married. 

" (4) That whereas doubt has been entertained whether 
our Lord meant to permit such marriage to the innocent 
party, the Conference are unwilling to suggest any precise 
instruction in the matter.'' The Bishop of the diocese is to 
decide " whether clergy would be justified in refraining from 
pronouncing the blessing of the Church on such unions." 



APPENDED NOTES 123 

These Pan-Anglican Conferences are not legitimate synods, 
provincial or general, and the language of this resolution 
implies the recognition of this fact. But the resolutions 
represent fairly the present mind of Anglican bishops, given 
with a due sense of spiritual responsibility. For " the differ- 
ence of opinion which there has always been in the Church " 
on the respect of the re-marriage of the innocent party, 
reference may be made to the Library of the Fathers. Ter- 
tullian, Note O. pp. 431 f. 

It is interesting to note that Dr. Liddon, in a letter to the 
Guardian of Sept. 19, 1888, recording Dr. Dollinger's general 
satisfaction at the results of the Pan-Anglican Conference 
writes : " To advert to a point which has caused some anxiety 
— the Conference was, as he believed, right in recommend- 
ing that the clergy should not be instructed to refuse the 
sacraments to the innocent party who remarried after a 
divorce for adultery. He still had no doubt that iropvua in 
St. Matt. v. 32 and xix. 9 could not mean /xot^eta but must 
refer to something that had taken place before the marriage 
contract. The decision of the Conference was, however, jus- 
tified by the history of opinion in the Church, about which 
he had more to say than could be compressed into a letter." 

But the Anglican 107th Canon of 1603, with the Western 
Church as a whole, takes the stricter line of forbidding the 
re-marriage of either party in a divorce and separation " a 
thoro et mensa " during each other's life. This line is 
undoubtedly more logical, but there does not seem to be 
adequate authority for enforcing it. 

Note 17, to p. 109. 

Christ our example and our inward life. The Collect for 
the Octave of the Epiphany expresses this thought very 
beautifully : — " Deus cuius unigenitus in substantia nos- 
trae carnis apparuit, praesta, quaesumus, ut per eum, quern 
similem nobis foris agnovimus, intus reformari mereamur : 
qui tecum vivit." 



CHURCH HISTORY. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. With a View of tho 
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GEORGE P. FISHER, D.D., LL.D., Professor of Church 
History in Yale College. 8vo, $2.50. 

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HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. By GEORGE P. 
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Yale University. 8vo, with numerous maps, $3.50. 

This work is in several respects notable. It gives an able presenta- 
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" It has appeared to me better to express frankly the conclusions to wliich my 
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CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES AND 
HOMILETICS. 



THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF. By 
Prof. GEORGE P. FISHER, D.D., LL.D., Professor of 
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FROM THE PREFACE.—" This volume embraces a discussion of the evidence 
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special interest at present from their connection with modern theories and diffi- 
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remark that the strongest proof of Christianity is afforded by Christianity itself, 
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ESSAYS ON THE SUPERNATURAL ORIGIN OF CHRISTIAN- 
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CHARLES SCBIBKER'S SONS* 



THE PHILOSOPHIC BASIS OF THEISM. An Examination of the 

Personality of Man, to Ascertain his Capacity to Know and 
Serve Cod, and the Validity of the Principle Underlying the 
Defense of Theism. By SAMUEL HARRIS, D.D., LL.D., Pro- 
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THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. By SAMUEL HARRIS, 
D.D., LL.D., Professor of Systematic Theology in Yale Col- 
lege. 8vo, $3.50. 

In this volume Dr Harris presents a statement of the evidence of 
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in the experience or consciousness of men, and the verification of the 
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ongoing of the universe, and in Christ. 

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wort is not brought out in a day, but is the growth of years of professional study 
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them truthfully, seriously, and strongly." 

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theology." 



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THE THEORY OF PREACHING; or, Lectures on Homiletics. 
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MEN AND BOOKS; OR, STUDIES IN HOMILETICS. Lectures 
Introductory to the "Theory of Preaching." By Professor 
AUSTIN PHELPS, D.D. Crown 8vo, S2.00. 

Professor Phelps' second volume of lectures is devoted to a dis- 
cussion of the sources of culture and power in the profession of the 
pulpit, its power to absorb and appropriate to its own uses the world 
of real life in the present, and the world of the past, as it lives in 
books. 

PROFESSOR GEORGE P. FISHER.— "It is a live book, animated as well as 
sound and instructive, in which conventionalities are brushed aside, and the 
author goes straight to the marrow of the subject. No minister can read it 
without being waked up to a higher conception of the possibilities of his calling." 

BOSTON WATCHMAN.—" We are sure that no minister or candidate for the 
ministry can read it without profit. It is a tonic for one's mind to read a book so 
laden with thought and suggestion, and written in a style so fresh, strong, and 
bracing." 

A TREATISE ON HOMILETiCS AND PASTORAL THEOLOGY. 
By W. G. T. SHEDD, D.D. Crown 8vo, $2.50. 

In this work, treating of the main points of Homiletics and Pastoral 
Theology, the author handles his subject in a masterly manner, and 
displays much original and highly suggestive thought. The Homileti- 
cal part is especially valuable to ministers aud those in training for the 
ministry. Dr. Shedd's style is a model of purity, simplicity and 
strength. 

THE NEW YORK EVANGELIST.—" We cannot but regard it as, on the whole, 
the very best production of the kind with which we are acquainted. The topics 
discussed arc of the first importance to every minister of Chri3t engaged in active 
service, and their discussion i3 conducted by earnestness as well as ability, and in 
a stylo which for clear, vigorous, and unexceptionable English, is itself a model." 

THE CHRISTIAN INTELLIGENCER.— » The ablest book on the subject which 
the generation has produced." 



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